Slapstick Criminal Minds with a Side of Kevorkian

Serial killer senior citizen aunts have never been so delightful and inviting as in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944).  Two altruistic spinsters use the ruse of a room for rent to offer mercy killings for the lonely.  An excommunicated black sheep of the family returns home a more evil brand of killer with a Boris Karloff face transplant.  And let us not forget Teddy who is laboring under the delusion that he’s Teddy Roosevelt, burying yellow fever victims in the cellar where he’s also digging the Panama Canal.  All in one little movie.  Insanity, right?

I doubt that anyone today would have the creative bravura to combine these elements in a film, but if they did, it would be littered with cheap tricks like sidelong psychotic glances and writhing victims; the aunts would surely possess the grating, archetypal cackle.  And given this stewpot of a situation, that would be way too much--a fear-infested farce.  (I’m less than impressed with the genre of horror as it currently stands.)  Arsenic and Old Lace is completely successful in presenting itself as a comedy, a morbid curiosity that is completely unpredictable.  The fact that I never see the corpses never deters my enjoyment (but I never doubt their presence or power within the scope of the film).  The characters and the backdrop of situation override the need for gruesome evidence of crimes committed.  The first shot of Jonathan Brewster’s still-healing face transplant is terrifying enough . . . and then also fodder for some of the best comic remarks in the movie.  The shot of Jonathan’s case of torture tools inspires a visceral wave of fear, but only for a moment.  A bumbling beat cop who wants to be a playwright interrupts the impending dismemberment and once again comic mayhem rules the day.

This really is one of the strangest combinations of plot elements and characterizations I’ve encountered in American film, and it’s a bubbling cauldron of charm.  Who says crime is for young hoodlums?  I encourage you to sit down with the Aunts Brewster for a cup of tea and a ginger snap-of-the-neck!