by Douglas Messerli
Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein (screenplay, based on the play
by Joseph Kesselring), Frank Capra (director) Arsenic and Old Lace /
1944
It has always been my contention that if you stare at the screen of a
Cary Grant movie long enough you’ll spot a naked limb—poking out of a closet or
from under the bed—of some other man living in the same house where the actor
has just married or is about to marry his female co-star. That other man may be
a secondary figure in the plot or perhaps another version of our hero, one that
looks very much like him but behaves in an entirely different manner, a kind of
inverted doppelgänger. But in either case he is dangerous force ready to
destroy the couple’s conjugal life as soon as the credits scroll to the film’s
end.
Of course, most people
don’t spot the arm, the leg, or even the penis of the “other,” and if they do,
by the time they’ve returned home after seeing the film they’ve forgotten all
about it. And no one I know imagines the film as having a life after the screen
has declared “The End.” But I’m queer that way, always wondering how he’s going
to explain the other man living in his house to his wife the next day or the
day after when she opens the closet door or attempts to run the vacuum cleaner
under the mattress.
Given her own sexual
interests, Katherine Hepburn as Susan Vance would probably have never given it
a second thought; and if Irene Dunne playing Ellen Wagstaff Arden might have
been a little surprised to see her former companion Adam (Grant’s real-life
lover Randolph Scott) swimming in their family pool, she’d probably be happy to
have such an intimate friend hanging around, and besides she already knew “the
awful truth” way back in 1937; given her beauty, Grace Kelly as Frances Stevens
could easily find herself another man than the former cat burglar she still
suspected of stealing her mother’s jewels; Joan Fontaine’s Lina McLaidlaw
Aysgarth was already on her way to her mother’s house in terror of the man she
married; Eva-Marie Saint pretending to be Eve Kendall, was accustomed to
duplicity and had herself lived a morally suspect life; and after all those
marriages to Rock Hudson, Doris Day portraying the hard-to-get Cathy Timberlake
was perfectly at home with the idea that there might be another man in her
husband’s life.*
But poor Priscilla Lane
after all that waiting around for hours and hours for her husband Cary to
settle his family affairs in Arsenic and Old Lace. I worry about her.
She’d not only be disappointed, but, as a preacher’s daughter, probably quite
shocked, even if by film’s end she knows he’s left a fairly large number of
buried bodies in his path to the marriage altar. But I’ll talk about that later.
Lane, playing Elaine
Harper, Mortimer Brewster’s (Grant) next door neighbor, has the deck stacked
against her, sexually speaking, from the very first frame. Elaine and Mortimer
have escaped the wild woods of Brooklyn—where even the Brooklyn Dodgers’
baseball game quickly devolves into a violent donnybrook—in order to get
married, as the early intertitles proclaim, in the United States “proper,”
Manhattan. But once there, we see Mortimer, still hiding in the closet or, at
least, trying to cover up his identity, not because he might be recognized as a
gay man but because he’s waiting in the line to register his marriage with
Elaine. It’s an odd twist, but it establishes from the very beginning of the
work that there is something definitely queer about him. In this case, we
discover, the noted drama critic has also penned several volumes arguing
against marriage and has become, as he puts it, “the symbol of bachelorhood,”
and he’s terrified of the press reporting his perfidy to the cause. When,
despite his dark glasses and attempts to whisper his name to the wedding clerk,
reporters catch a glimpse of who’s
As he attempts to explain
to his about-to-be-wedded wife: “How could I marry you? Me? ...l’ve written
four million words against marriage. ...Marriage is a superstition. It’s old
fashioned. ....I can’t go through with it. I won’t marry you and that’s that.”
In short, Mortimer seems to represent, as they used to describe homosexuals, a
man who is “not the marrying kind.”
Yet inexplicably before he has returned
to the New York borough where “anything can happen and usually does,” he has,
to use in this case a very appropriate metaphor, “tied the noose.” He and the
new missus seem so utterly delighted with one another that even the taxi driver
(Garry Owen) complains, upon delivering them up to the Brewster mansion
situated next to ancient cemetery on Halloween night, that they have so
oscillated the frame of the cab that he may have to get new shock absorbers.
Elaine and Mortimer stop by their homes for a change of clothing before they’re
off to Niagara Falls to enjoy every honeymoon cliché in the marital scrapbook.
Mortimer’s doting aunts
Abby and Martha (impeccably performed by the extraordinary duo of Josephine
Hull and Jean Adair) are delighted by the news and insist upon serving up a
cake which, having predicted the event weeks before, they have kept ready in the
cooler. And even Elaine’s disapproving father (Grant Mitchell) is finally
prepared to bless the event. Mortimer goes so far as to demand his aunts burn
his notes for his new manuscript of Mind over Matrimony. When Mortimer
finally realizes that nearly everyone near him had long ago presumed that he
and Elaine would marry, he asks “Did everyone in Brooklyn know I was getting
married except me?” Twenty minutes into the film, accordingly, it might seem
that, despite the couple’s rocky start, Arsenic and Old Lace—if somehow
you’ve managed to miss one of the thousands of annual high school and amateur
theater productions—is about to present a seemingly perfect world of normalcy.
“It’s one of our charitable endeavors,” the women calmly explain to their astonished nephew. Apparently when elderly gentlemen ring their door in response to their “room for rent” sign, they serve the generally unhappy, lonely men without families—translated from the polite parlance of the day into what we now might describe as elder homosexuals—a delicious homemade elderberry wine, with Martha’s recipe of a few spoons of arsenic and strychnine and “just a pinch of cyanide” stirred in.
Calling upon the help of
their delusional brother, Teddy (who believes he is Teddy Roosevelt) to take
these suffering men to the basement and bury them in the locks of the Panama
Canal he digs for the occasion, they have provided peace to twelve such men, “a
baker’s dozen,” marking their graves with flowers and praying over them.
Needless to say, the
previously excitable would-be lover now suddenly develops the ticks of a
hysteric, forcing his eyes to nearly pop from their sockets, and dropping his
jaw with the regularity of his stuttering incredulity for the rest of the film.
Indeed, Grant’s new tics grow so severe that the first time I saw this film
decades ago, I thought the actor was undergoing some sort of nervous breakdown
from which I feared he might never regain his formerly suave surety. But Capra
often has had that effect upon his actors, and Grant, fortunately, regained
consciousness two years later in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, where his
film-studio-intended bride promptly marries another man. (Regarding Capra’s
effect on his leading actors, if you recall Gary Cooper was ready to hurl
himself off the top of the city’s highest skyscraper in Meet John Doe
and the suicidal James Stewart jumped into the local river in It’s a
Wonderful Life.)
But then what is a
character to do upon discovering that his beloved aunties—who almost raised him
during what we soon discover was an abusive childhood—are serial murderers? He
does what any good nephew might do, accept the bodies as his own responsibility
(after all, as I declare above, male bodies have always been left behind as
evidence of Grant’s sexual interests in his films so he’s a pro), and to
deflect Abby and Martha’s terrifyingly good intentions by locking away their
more obviously mad brother in the institution they’d already agreed upon,
Happydale, a kind of pretend therapeutic retreat.
Mortimer spends much of
the rest of the film looking after the details about Teddy’s (John Alexander)
incarceration: a call to the director of Happydale (the always implacable
Edward Everett Horton), and signatures from a lawyer, a doctor, and Teddy
himself, all of which lead to further frustration as the lawyer attempts to
burst into various cliché-ridden speeches, the doctor fusses over his meeting
with the mad President who elevates him to the position of an ambassador, and
the patient signs as Roosevelt, needing to be convinced that Brewster without
the ‘b,” rooster and a forthcoming coming trip to the African veldt is code for
the 26th President’s name.
Clearly the newlywed no
longer has time to attend to a wife. When Elaine calls, Mortimer answers “Not
now! Not now! Whatever you do, keep your shirt on!” When she finally storms
over for a showdown she’s met with complete rejection: “What are you doing
here? You better go home. Will you get out of here!” Their love seems as dead
as the first syllable of his name.
Throughout Joseph
Kesselring’s play, skillfully adapted by the noted screenwriters Julius and
Philip Epstein, people keep transforming into other beings: the uncle has
permanently become Roosevelt (when his sisters suggested another identity, they
tell us, he crawled under his bed and “refused to be anybody”), the sweet
Brewster aunts become murderous villains, and now Mortimer himself becomes more
and more unhinged, as he mistakenly wears the dead man Hoskin’s hat, and
reverts to his pre-martial self, a harsh critic of marital bliss. As one of the
aunt’s observes, “Mortimer doesn’t quite seem to be himself today.”
Enter his brother Jonathan (Raymond
Massey) who looks like Boris Karloff (and in the original Broadway production
was hilariously played by Karloff pretending to be someone else) along with
Jonathan’s “partner” in crime Dr. Herman Einstein (a role perfectly cast with
another hyperthyroid figure, Peter Lorre).
Jonathan and Herman are
also a kind of queer couple who together commit murders, having racked up by
traveling throughout the world twelve male victims of their own. Accordingly,
the aunts, as Einstein observes, are just as good as Jonathan, the quartet
having together done in 24 men, one for each hour of day. The sadistic Jonathan
and his passive cohort are clearly more into sadomasochism and torture, and
their love making, so it appears, consists mostly of Einstein lovingly
practicing plastic surgery upon Jonathan’s face. The scene in which Lorre,
hovering closely over the scarred Frankenstein-like creature he has created as
he sensuously describes what he plans for Jonathan’s ears, nose, eyes, and chin
is far sexier, I’d argue, than Grant’s languid kisses of Lane.
Indeed, Lorre may be the
most loveable figure in the entire work, as he shyly pleads for another drink,
a little sleep, and less torturous methods for the murder than Jonathan is
planning of his brother. When late in the work, Einstein sneaks away from his
former companion, escaping arrest and imprisonment through the miracle of the
absurdly unobservant police chief, it is with such an appreciative smile of
delight that we almost want to applaud him as he closes the otherwise endlessly
opening door of the Brewster house.
The sudden arrival of Jonathan along
with the window seat appearance of yet another body not only heightens the
sense of chaos but forces the now hysterical dramatic critic to turn into a
silent observer of the very story he has helped to concoct, including his own
being gagged and hog-tied to a chair as the police, through mere happenstance,
save the day by almost accidentally arresting Mortimer’s mad brother. By
coincidence, the two guilty sisters suddenly get a hankering to join Teddy in
the sanatorium to where he’s about to be whisked off. It’s a perfect solution
to Mortimer’s problems, particularly since the aunts are now even admitting to
the police that there are 13 bodies in their basement.
Once he is finally
released from his gag and bindings, and—through his aunts’ confession that he
is actually the son of a sailor married to the family cook—freed from his
previous blood-links to the Brewster ancestors, relieving his fear of insanity
which seems to gallop through the family genes, Mortimer now needs only to
establish the unreliability of his two aunts as well, hoping without calling
them insane to their faces, he can prevent the chief of police from
investigating their claim of all those buried bodies.
In a grand acting out of a
charades-like game, Mortimer goes charging up the stairs like his uncle, and
when the aunts once more claim the burial of the 13 men, he ludicrously insists
he himself has hundreds more in the attic. The dense-headed police chief still
can’t quite make sense of his extravagant camp-like message, Mortimer takes up
a new tact; when Abby and Martha insist all the graves are marked with flowers,
their nephew argues that his graves feature neon lights. When the sisters claim
that, despite the one intruder put there by Jonathan and Einstein, that the
other twelve are all their “gentlemen,” Mortimer minces in the manner we’ve
become accustomed in Hollywood films’ portrayal of faggots, “Oh, you’d like
mine better. None of mine are gentlemen!” If we ever wondered what Mortimer
Brewster was doing between shows all those years he covered Broadway, we now
have the evidence.
Finally, of course, the
chief decodes the message, realizing that it might be better to send off the
Brewster women to Happydale and leave the cellar to myth and exaggeration. Yet
anyone who can read gay code realizes the true message is that Mortimer clearly
does have all sorts of male bodies in his attic—or at least locked away in his
head if not in his actual past. And now that he is freed to become his “real”
self, the son of sailing cook, who knows on what voyage his mind might take
him?
Meanwhile, the completely
ignored and almost forgotten Elaine has snuck into the basement through the
storm cellar door only to discover the truth. Her claim that “There really
are 13 bodies in the basement” must be silenced by Mortimer’s long kiss, as
he carries her off to her own bedroom where presumably he will demand his
spousal rights and restore the film to the normalcy of its first quarter.
Yet the wife, at film’s
end, still knows the truth. And the bodies her husband has been trying so hard
to cover up won’t simply go away. How will Mortimer deal with her questions the
next morning? Who are all those men and where did they come from? His aunts and
uncle will surely never have answer for them since Mortimer has freed them from
suspicion by assuring they are safely locked away.
You see what I mean? In
this film there’s not only a few male limbs to account for but an entire crypt
full of skeletons in the closet which Grant’s character has worked so hard to
keep others from checking out. Given all the queer goings on in both the film
and stage version of Arsenic and Old Lace (although the Epstein’s
clearly added the juicer tidbits) it’s a wonder that high school
students and amateur actors keep putting new flesh on this work’s old bones.
But then, as I recall, when my high school presented this play, I acted the
role of one of the dense-headed cops without imagining anything unusual at all
might be going on.
*For
those acquainted with Cary Grant’s oeuvre, I am referring obviously to the
films Bringing Up Baby (1938), My Favorite Wife (1940), Suspicion
(1941), To Catch a Thief (1955), North by Northwest (1959),
and That Touch of Mink (1962). I’ve written about the first two films
within the LGBTQ context as well as both Hepburn’s and Grant’s sexually
ambiguous roles in Sylvia Scarlett (1935) and Grant and Dunne’s divorce
and reunion in The Awful Truth (1937). I’ve also discussed Grant’s
confused sexuality in regard to Kiss and Makeup (1934) and I Was a
Male War Bride (1949).
Los Angeles, February 24, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February
2021).
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