ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (1944) *** This is what Cary Grant was great at! Standing there being handsome, and making silly faces in the midst of morally dubious chaos. Like Jerry Lewis, trying to be an accountant. Of course they couldn't have done it without the benevolent serial killing grannies (Josephine Hull, Jean Adair), the evil sibling (Raymond Massey), the eagerly expectant bride on the back burner (Priscilla Lane), or Dr. Einstein, the mad scientist from Heidelberg (Peter Lorre), but the reality is that this film owes more to Frank Capra than to anyone who actually appears in it. Capra fell in love with the Broadway play, so much so that he brought it straight to screen, rather than making a movie about a play. What's looked like a failed and lazy strategy when tried by others comes out as successful and gutsy. The black and white film, the grim lighting, if anything Capra was working with less than a theater set. At least one or two good lines were removed from the Broadway version, at least one in deference to the sensitive, but not especially developed, moral set of the day. Ironically that which made this so popular, the extreme decadence of murderous grandmothers, now renders the entire thing more drab than precious. The grannies don't, for example, hack off anyone's heads with axes. Of course Grant couldn't have looked on so sympathetically, which is what the entire drama revolves around, so I'd have to go on record as scoring one for subtlety. Except in the case of Lorre, in which instance we should remember that there's always been something appealing about deranged genius posing as itself.
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