Death and laughter.

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: REEL WORLD - Movie Review

THE INITIAL STAGE PRODUCTION of Joseph Kesselring's black comedy "Arsenic and Old Lace" started its pre-Broadway run to the Great White Way 65 years ago. Eventually opening in January of 1941, the mega-hit would run until June, 1944. Today's fans of this dark comedy usually come by way of director Frank Capra's celebrated 1941 adaptation, though the picture was not released until 1944. Though now seen as completely innocuous, that originally was not the case.

The story finds two sweet little old ladies (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair, who also starred on Broadway) welcoming lonely unattached elderly men into their boardinghouse home only to slip them some elderberry wine ... with a touch of arsenic. The philosophy of these delightfully demented women is that these lonely men will be happier when the troubles of this world are over. A brother (John Alexander) living with the women thinks he is Teddy Roosevelt. Consequently, he buries the gentlemen in the cellar--thinking them yellow fever victims from the digging of the Panama Canal.

The movie also features Cary Grant as Mortimer Brewster, the loony family's one sane member, holed up murderers (Raymond Massey and Peter Lorre), Grant's love interest (Priscilla Lane), and Edward Everett Horton as the keeper of the local Happy Dale Sanitarium. Massey's connection to this nutty household is as the nephew to the kindly aunts. Lorre is an alcoholic plastic surgeon who changes Massey's appearance after each killing. Fittingly for a dark comedy, the incompetent Lorre inadvertently has turned Massey into a Frankenstein look alike. (On Broadway the part was played by Boris Karloff, the original cinema Frankenstein.)

The movie's solid period reviews still had many critics feeling awkward about the then-groundbreaking dark comedy subject matter. For instance, the Eileen Creelman of the New York Sun observed, "The movie is fast, funny, but unlike the play, somewhat gruesome ... there are moments when the sight of an insane family rushing corpses around the drawing room called for shudders rather than laughs." Creelman went on to hypothesize that the film was darker "because the camera makes any scene more intimate."

She might have been speaking for the film's director, because this precisely was his reason for eliminating two different endings for "Arsenic." As in the play, Capra shot the closing scene where Horton, the Happy Dale director, has come for "Teddy Roosevelt," only to fall victim to the...