Death and laughter

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 elderberry wine. At the first preview, however, the audience was demonstratively upset with losing the beloved character actor's Mr. Witherspoon. Consequently, Capra gave the figure a reprieve, "On the stage," Capra later explained, "there was a distance between the audience and the players, but a closer film medium has a way of making everything seem realistic. I'm sure the movie audience was right about Horton."

Moreover, the camera intimacy further heightens the quick emotional swings of dark comedy. For instance, a 1944 "Arsenic" press kit credited Capra with saying the picture "was a demonstration of the fact that comedy is closely allied to tragedy and that it doesn't take much of a push to send the dramatic see-saw from tears to giggles and back again."

This is a provocative Capra quote for three reasons. To have him apply it here is to broaden one's perspective of him as a humanist. Second, though one would seldom equate "Arsenic" with tears--unless they were tears of laughter--there potentially is the tragic slant of aging and euthanasia. The fact that dark humor addresses such subjects is one reason critics sometimes refer to the genre as "anti-comedy." Third, for Capra--such a gifted and celebrated mainstream American director of normally feel-good middle-class pictures--to embrace dark comedy at this time (1940s) was a harbinger of the genre's increased future visibility.

Indeed, "Arsenic" is a model for many of the dark comedies which followed. For example, the genre has three interrelated themes: man as beast, the absurdity of the world, and the omnipresence of death. "Arsenic" showcases man as beast through the murderous Massey. Absurdity springs from two sweet little old ladies quietly offing lonely elderly men, with poor Cary Grant accenting this strangeness through his bug-eyed performance-first triggered by finding a body in the window seat. Moreover, the omnipresence of death is there in an "Arsenic" basement full of bodies, with Massey promising to add his own wing. "Arsenic" also features a number of other components which have become a staple of dark comedies, such as the dysfunctional family. Borrowing a line from humorist Robert Benchley, the "Arsenic" screenplay has Grant's character say of his family, "Insanity runs in the family. In fact, it practically gallops."

Dark comedy often is about a central antiheroic figure who is no more than a leaf in the wind--constantly buffeted about by the world around him. Grant is that figure in "Arsenic," though he later disliked the frantic, frazzled performance Capra coached out of him. Of course, this banjo-eyed comic victim flies in the face of the cool unflappable persona Grant had established in so many films.