A favorite oldie...

“I get wonderful ideas, but I can’t spell ‘em.” Brooklyn cop, playwright wannabe.

1941: war is brewing; in fact, it’s positively bellowing overseas. Ma Bell has just come up with a nifty hand piece that combines the ear and speaking unit; how to get the public to ante up? Ah, a new Joseph Kesselring play erupts upon Broadway, headlining Boris Karloff, wherein our hero spends a good deal of time on the phone. (Operator, can you hear my voice? Are you sure? [groans] Then I must be here.) Why not fund a motion picture of same?

Of course, the numerous Boris Karloff jokes may not work without Boris himself…but wait! Raymond Massey can do an impression that will float the boat. Peter Lorre is available to play Dr. Einstein, the Epstein Brothers can adapt the play, and Frank Capra will direct…it’ll be a smash!

The Brewster home, next to the church and cemetery, houses two old ladies whose days are given to charitable pursuits. Sure, the neighbors complain about nephew Teddy’s bugle whenever he charges up San Juan Hill (the staircase), but the one time the aunts forbade Teddy to be Roosevelt, he hid under the bed for two days, refusing to be anyone at all.

A second nephew, Mortimer, is currently swallowing the four million words he’s written against marriage, slain by the sweet, trusting eyes of Elaine, the minister’s daughter. With a taxi waiting outside to take him and his new bride to Niagara Falls, Mortimer stumbles across one of his aunts’ favorite charities, wherein they bring peace to lonely old men via their elderberry wine, made with arsenic, strychnine and just a pinch of cyanide. The men, an even dozen now, are laid to rest, with hymnal singing, in the Panama locks Teddy digs in the basement.

Struggling to hide their secret, persuade them to give up this one little charity, and mollify the neighbors by getting Teddy into the Happy Dale Sanitarium (oh, I’m sorry, but we already have too many Teddy Roosevelt’s…but we’re a bit shy of Napoleans…?), Mortimer is already up to his ears when his long-lost brother Jonathan reappears, having escaped the Asylum for the Criminally Insane, dragging along with him a drunken Dr. Einstein and a dead Mr. Spinouzo.

The story spins frantically, but merrily, along, with the aunts protesting loudly when Jonathan wants to bury his corpse alongside theirs (it’s not right for a Methodist to be buried with a foreigner!), Jonathan determined to get rid of pesky Mortimer once and for all, and the beat cop determined to get stage critic Mortimer to listen to his play.

Cary Grant has a grand time as Mortimer, getting paid for the looks and sighs he first learned as a teacher faced with inattentive and dimwitted students, and running wonderfully hot and cold with his new wife. “Insanity runs in my family,” he tells Elaine. “In fact, it practically gallops!”

All ends well, naturally, with Mortimer discovering he’s not a Brewster after all, but the son of a sea-cook. Unfortunately for Ma Bell, whose contract forbade release of the film until the stage version folded (who knew it would run for 1,444 days?), “Arsenic and Old Lace,” while indeed a smash both in the US and in England, by its release in 1944 was not much of an advertisement.