Arsenic and Old Lace
The story of two serial killers and their nephew. Cary Grant plays the nephew, who starts from a place of ignorance about his aunts, and who as he becomes clued in gets more and more unhinged, ending in a state of ironic detachment (“Fight, fight, fight,” he mutters to himself during a late scene in which all of the other characters brawl). The Filmstruck stream of Arsenic and Old Lace comes packaged with an interview with Chris Elliott, who describes his shock on first seeing Grant in such a wild comedic turn, and then traces a path of influence from Grant to Steve Martin and his ilk. Grant apparently hated his own performance (so did Pauline Kael), considering it over the top – that is perhaps what links him most closely to the modern (modernist? Is Steve Martin modern?) comic style. Grant gives us zaniness from a person who is not himself zany. He’s thinking his way through the slapstick, measuring the angles to deliver maximum satisfaction, and while not above the whole thing not below it either. Arsenic and Old Lace was filmed around the same time as Bugs Bunny was refining his act, and it could be that modern comedy and this Grant performance are linked less through direct influence then by sharing the lineage of Bugs; or perhaps by emerging at various removes from the rich comedic ooze from which Bugs himself parthogestated.
On Grant’s eyes: Grant acts this entire movie through his eyes. I’d never noticed before what saucer eyes Grant has, and here he uses them. At one point a gag is shoved in his mouth and the whole force of his wanting to amuse is forced through his eyes, and the effect is a little like breaking the fourth wall.
A word this film brought to mind: saccade. A rapid, firm movement of the gaze.
A phrase I thought of putting in regarding Grant and his eyes, and then left out: “he flexes them like pectorals”.
Two roles played by Grant in other films, as described by Pauline Kael: “celebrated javelin thrower” (This is the Night); and “a Broadway sharpie exploiting a boy who [has] a pet dancing caterpillar” (Once Upon a Time).
I somehow heard about the plot of Arsenic and Old Lace when I was a kid, or at least just the part about there being two nice elderly women who are going around poisoning people. This seemed very menacing to me, in a pleasant way. I thought of it as a horror movie, especially because I didn’t know why the women were doing it. For the satisfaction, I thought. It turns out though that the women, Abby and Martha, are poisoning poor lonely old men, because they believe that death is preferable to a life of suffering – it’s an act of mercy. Philosophically it’s an interesting question, but Abby and Martha do such a cursory job of vetting the happiness potential of their victims that it tends to moot any potential utilitarian upside. In one scene they offer a cup of poisoned wine to a potential murderee; he raises it to his lips, distracted lowers it, raises it again… watching him the faces of Abby and Martha are so eager, so vulpine, that any question of what’s really driving them disappears – is answered too clearly - and in that moment the movie really is horror. It’s set on Halloween, by the way, and the credits show animated witches on broomsticks, and there is a cemetery and there are dead leaves blowing in the wind. Boris Karloff stared in the Broadway version.
