Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Mortimer Brewster, a newspaper drama critic, playwright, and author known for his diatribes against marriage, suddenly falls in love and gets married; but when he makes a quick trip home to tell his two maiden aunts, he finds out his aunts' hobby - killing lonely old men and burying them in the cellar!
Arsenic and Old Lace is a gleefully macabre screwball comedy with a brilliantly constructed farcical plot that keeps escalating its absurdities. Cary Grant's rubber-faced, over-the-top performance is iconic — arguably his most physically comedic work — and the supporting cast (Raymond Massey, Peter Lorre, Josephine Hull, Jean Adair) is uniformly superb. The film's blend of cheerful murder, gothic atmosphere, and rapid-fire comedy was genuinely distinctive for its era and remains a singular tone — dark yet breezy. Cinematography is competent studio-era work by Sol Polito but unremarkable beyond efficient stage-to-screen adaptation. The ending, while satisfying in its comic resolution, feels slightly rushed and relies on a convenient reveal that deflates rather than crowns the escalating madness.