Arsenic and Old Lace 1944

     This film is based on a play with the same title by Joseph Kesselring.  Mortimer Brewster is a newspaperman and he is well known for his rants against marriage.  In the opening scene, he is getting married at city hall?  Mortimer and his new bride go to his home to tell Mortimer’s two maiden aunts about this important event.  Mortimer is trying to tell the aunts about the wedding.  Instead, he learns that the hobby of his aunts is to kill lonely old men and bury them in the cellar?  How can this be true?  Soon after Mortimer’s discovery, his brother and a doctor show up at their home.  His brother looks like Frankenstein and the doctor may not be sane?

      There is a LOT of frantic action in this film and there is also comedy.  Mortimer can’t handle the fact that he just got married and also the secrets he learns about his aunts.  His bride lives next door and he asks her to go to her house instead of going on their honeymoon?  Mortimer is very surprised that his brother and the doctor have come to the house?  His older brother was not very kind to Mortimer when they were growing up!!  3 ½* (I liked this movie)

118 min, Comedy directed by Frank Capra with Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, Raymond Massey, Jack Carson, Edward Everett Horton, Peter Lorre, James Cleason, Josephine Hull, Jean Adair, John Alexander, Grant Mitchell, Edward McNamara, Garry Owen, John Ridgely, Vaughan Glaser.

Note:  Imdb 8 out of 10, Rotten Tomatoes, 88% critic 92% audience, Amazon 4.7* out of 5* with 1313 reviews, TCM Leonard Maltin 3.5* out of 4* average user rating 4.5* out of 5*.

Special Note:  This movie was filmed in 1941 because Cary Grant was available at this time.  It was released in 1944 and the original stage version had finished its run on Broadway.  Filmed at Warner Brothers Burbank Studios, California.  Cary Grant considered this to be his least favorite of all his movies.  He thought his acting was horribly over the top?  Twenty years before filming, Jean Adair helped nurse a very sick vaudeville performer named Archie Leach.  Adair and Leach became good friends and Leach changed his name to Cary Grant.  Originally, the role of Mortimer was for Bob Hope but he couldn’t be released from his Paramount Pictures contract.