A Film Canon

 

 

Arsenic And Old Lace explicates Capra's cacaphonous conversation-space as a madhouse, centring on a pair of spinsters who routinely perform mercy killings, for the sake of the old and (supposedly) lonely, and their nephew Mortimer (Cary Grant), who is so committed to being alone that he has written several books on the value of singledom, and regards his own engagement as a source of profound shame. This produces a fairly original combination of comedy and horror, especially upon the arrival of Mortimer's evil brother Jonathan (Raymond Massey) and the plastic surgeon (Peter Lorre) responsible for his many facial reconstructions, the most recent of which is modelled upon Boris Karloff's Frankenstein, and so exudes a tangible irrealism that clarifies Capra's indebtedness to animation in general, and Disney in particular, placing the surgeon in a position where he is confronted by the horrific autonomy of his own penmanship. However, for the most part the script suffers from excessive staginess, which remains unredeemed by Mortimer's briefly sketched background as a prominent theatre critic, as well as the constant, contrived speculations on the similarities between theatricality and reality, art and life. Similarly, this scenario lends itself to Grant's most self-congratulatory, one-dimensional proclivities, such that his performance feels like little more than a series of hyperbolic double-takes, and is never far from explicitly acknowledging the camera. That said, there's a certain ingenuity to Capra's establishment of this fairy tale as a skewed version of reality, rather than fantasy per se - or, more specifically, his vision of Brooklyn as a mere perpetuation of Halloween - that anticipates the magnificent dystopia that haunts his next.