PROLOGUE: WINDOW SEAT

He is not looking for a corpse. He is looking for his notes.

That detail is worth holding onto, because everything that follows depends on it. Mortimer Brewster comes back to the house in Brooklyn on his wedding day, on an errand of pure vanity: somewhere in his aunts’ living room are the papers for the book he is writing against marriage — a book whose thesis he has just contradicted at the marriage license bureau, in front of two reporters, with a woman who lives across the cemetery. He rummages. He lifts the lid of the window seat the way a man lifts the lid of anything, without ceremony, expecting stationery.

Capra gives the discovery to Cary Grant’s face, and Grant, who spent his career being the most composed body in American cinema, does something that in a lesser actor would look like a seizure. The famous double take is not a reaction to death. It is a reaction to a category error. A window seat is furniture. Furniture does not contain people. The face has to travel, in about a second and a half, from a man mildly annoyed about paperwork to a man who has just been informed that the physical world has different rules than he thought, and it has to travel that distance twice, because the first look did not take.

The aunts come in with the table settings.

This is the film’s whole method compressed into ninety seconds, and it is worth being precise about what the method is, because it is easy to describe Arsenic and Old Lace wrongly and pleasantly — a nice black comedy about murderous old ladies, everybody’s crazy, isn’t that a scream. Everybody’s crazy is not an argument. It is the premise, and the premise is stated in the first reel. What the film actually spends two hours doing is far stranger and far more disciplined: it examines what happens to a household, and then to a neighbourhood, and finally to an entire apparatus of law and medicine and religion and journalism, when madness turns out to be organised and sanity turns out to be unpersuasive.

Abby and Martha Brewster are not confused. They have a method, a recipe, a schedule, a means of disposal, a rationale, and a rate of production they have sustained for years without attracting a single official suspicion. Teddy Brewster is not confused either. He has a name, an office, a foreign policy, an engineering project in the cellar, and an unshakeable sense of duty. Jonathan Brewster is the most lucid character in the film about the nature of what he does. Dr. Einstein understands the technical side of everything and the moral side of nothing, which makes him a professional. Even the police, who see less than anyone, are not confused; they are working from a perfectly reasonable model of the world in which two elderly ladies who welcome an officer in from the cold do not have twelve bodies in the cellar.

The confused man is Mortimer. He is confused because he is the only person in the house whose beliefs are being updated by evidence.

That inversion is the film’s engine, and this book is an attempt to take it seriously without spoiling it. There is a way of writing about comedies that consists of explaining, at length, why each joke is funny, and it leaves the joke lying on the table like a dissected frog. There is another way that consists of announcing that the comedy is secretly a tragedy, that beneath the laughter lies a bleak meditation on mortality, and this is worse, because it is a form of apology — it assumes comedy needs to be rescued into seriousness before an educated adult can admit to caring about it. Arsenic and Old Lace does not need rescuing. Its comic surface is not a wrapper around a grave film; the comic surface is the instrument of analysis. The film thinks by making you laugh at the specific point where the laugh is uncomfortable, and it thinks fastest when it is at its silliest.

So the aim here is double vision. Described in a police report, the Brewster house is a horror: thirteen men poisoned or strangled, buried in a residential cellar over a period of years, in a home occupied by a delusional adult who has been converted into unwitting grave labour, in a neighbourhood where nobody noticed. Experienced at Capra’s tempo, with Josephine Hull’s small aggrieved dignity and Jean Adair’s placid corrections and Grant’s escalating vocal register, the same house is one of the funniest environments in American film. Both descriptions are accurate. The book has to be able to hold them at the same time, because the film does, and because the holding is what produces the laugh. Nothing is funnier than the thing you cannot quite stop seeing clearly.

A word about method, and then we can open the lid.

The object of this study is the released 1944 film, directed by Frank Capra from a screenplay by Julius and Philip Epstein, shot at Warner Bros. in the last weeks of 1941 and held from release for years while the Broadway production went on selling tickets. Joseph Kesselring’s play exists; Karloff’s stage performance exists; there were changes, cuts, and a famous surrendered ending, and where those matter — and one of them ...