Kat’s Film and Book Reviews

Arsenic and Old Lace

1944

Directed by Frank Capra

In the just-over-a-decade from 1934 to 1946, Frank Capra hit his stride. The movies in that era were

• It Happened One Night (1934),
• Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936),
• You Can’t Take It With You (1938),
• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939),
• Meet John Doe (1941),
• Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), and
• It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

Not all of these films were immediately successful (the stories of It’s a Wonderful Life’s initial failure are now Hollywood legends), but each of them had at its heart an idealism, a basic kindness and spirit of joy. When Capra’s worldview is combined with some of the best actors of the era (Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, and James Stewart to name a few), the movies have staying power and endurance beyond many others of their time or ours.

Among the movies listed above, Arsenic and Old Lace stands out as a bit of an odd duck. Like You Can’t Take It With You, it was adapted from a stage play, and in fact it presents itself very much like a filmed play. Capra doesn’t choose to take the cinematic liberty of filming at multiple locations just because he can; instead he focuses most of the action within a genteel old Brooklyn house, and in the relationships between the characters. This is why a story about a family who has collectively murdered two dozen innocent people is actually a comedy.

Cary Grant stars as Mortimer Brewster, a drama critic and confirmed bachelor who falls for the minister’s daughter who lives next door to his aunts in Brooklyn. They get married in the first scene by a justice of the peace, then stop by Brooklyn so that he can tell his elderly aunts (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair) about the marriage, and so that she can pack for their honeymoon to Niagara Falls.

Once they reach Brooklyn, a few things become obvious to the viewer. One is that Mortimer dearly loves his aunts, who apparently raised him and his two brothers, Jonathan and Teddy. The other is that Teddy is delusional, and thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt, but he’s harmless and in fact is a great help and comfort to his aunts. There is some plot point talk about having Teddy committed to an asylum, but nobody sees any rush about it. There’s also some remembering about what a horrible child Jonathan was, and how he’s been gone for twenty years.

One of the best scenes in the film is the one where Mortimer discovers, quite by accident, that there is a dead body in the window seat. He reveals this shocking fact to his aunts, who serenely say that the dead man is one of their gentlemen, the twelfth such poor soul they have ministered to by taking him out of this life by means of poisoned elderberry wine. Cary Grant’s facial expressions and physical reactions are priceless and some of the best in his career. For some reason the plot never quite explains, Mortimer decides that the best way to deal with his aunts’ pastime of murdering lonely gentlemen and burying them in the cellar is to have his brother Teddy committed to the asylum immediately.

In the midst of this family crisis, the long-lost Jonathan returns home, accompanied by sidekick Dr. Herman Einstein, played with a sort of tortured humor by Peter Lorre. Jonathan has lived up to the promise he showed as a child and has become a psychopathic criminal with no qualms about murdering anyone who gets in his way, including his brother and aunts. And Jonathan also brings a dead body with him, so that for a while, there is a shuffling of bodies between the window seat and the graves dug in the basement, causing the aunts to be terribly indignant that they are expected to read services over a complete stranger.

Through a series of unlikely slapstick coincidences, the bad guys are caught, the aunts decide to commit themselves voluntarily, and Mortimer returns to his bride secure in the knowledge that he is adopted and therefore not likely to inherit the insanity that “practically gallops” through his family.

The emotional linchpin of the film is the affection that Mortimer feels for his aunts, and Capra makes this clear at every point: Grant’s frustration at their inability to understand that killing people is wrong wars with his desire to protect them from themselves and the consequences of their actions. The film isn’t without some serious problems—the ending is too easy and belies the seriousness of the situation, Mortimer’s attempts to get Teddy committed when it’s the aunts who are murdering people don’t make sense and are never explained, and the scenes in the middle with Jonathan and Dr. Einstein are too dark and pull the mood of the movie down so far it never quite recovers, so that Grant’s slapstick approach becomes almost clownish in the second half. It’s not that Capra never confronts darkness, but it’s usually the inner darkness of crushed idealism or apparent futility that his characters have to face, not murderous relatives.

Still, none of that matters very much while you’re watching it. Cary Grant is extraordinary both as a comedian and as an actor, Hull and Adair are perfectly charming and believable as the aunts whose only motivation is ever kindness and compassion. Most importantly, Frank Capra knows where the heart of the film is, and keeps it there. It’s best to watch it knowing full well that the scenario is unlikely, the plot is full of holes, but it’s fun to watch and laugh with anyway.

Casablanca

1942

Directed by Michael Curtiz

It’s one of the greatest love stories of the 20^th century…but he never tells her he loves her.

He says, famously, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” and a few other lines that are so much a part of the culture, but Rick Blaine never tells Ilsa Lund that he loves her. And yet, we don’t doubt it for a second. The first thing we see is not his love, but his pain. When Ilsa appears in Rick’s Cafe Americaine in the French Moroccan city of Casablanca, we see him lash out in anger and hurt. He remembers everything about her and about their time together in Paris, including how devastated he was when she left him standing in the rain with nothing but a goodbye note. After she leaves he sits down in the darkness, mutters his famous line, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns, she had to walk into mine,” and proceeds to down a bottle of bourbon.

Rick’s love for Ilsa is one of the great, tragic loves of Western cultural history, and the cornerstone of the 1942 film Casablanca. Rick himself is a character of depth and conflict, as compelling today as he was when the film was made in 1942. He tries to be cynical, and his exterior does fool some people, but the truly observant know that he is caring and trustworthy. He turned his back on those things in the wake of the pain of Ilsa’s betrayal, so the Rick we are first introduced to has as his motto, “I stick my neck out for nobody,” and then goes about proving it.

But once Ilsa returns to his life, his facade starts to crack, and it cracks fast. At first, all we see is pain. Ilsa renews her acquaintance with Sam (Dooley Wilson), Rick’s friend and piano player, and asks him to play the song that had had special meaning to her and Rick when they knew each other in Paris. This leads to one of the most famous, if misquoted, lines in the film, “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.’”

Rick comes rushing out of his office and snaps at Sam, “I thought I told you never to play–” And then he sees Ilsa. He doesn’t move, his expression doesn’t change, but we see it hit him like a wrecking ball. The next several scenes show Rick at important places in his character development. Unable to handle the pain of seeing Ilsa, he gets drunk, then treats her rudely when she comes to see him. We see a flashback of Rick and Ilsa’s love affair in Paris, when she thought her husband was dead, and the contrast between Rick-then and Rick-now is extraordinary. He was happy and openly in love, unlike his current situation where he hides behind self-interest and cynicism.

After the flashback, Rick sobers up and apologizes to Ilsa, and he seems to think that he has himself under control, when he learns that Ilsa was married to the man she is traveling with, Victor Laszlo, a Hungarian freedom fighter and resistance leader, while they were in love in Paris. He is wounded again, and again retreats into anger and cynicism, but the pieces of his shell can’t all be put back together, and we soon see him fixing the roulette tables in order to help a young Bulgarian couple win enough cash to purchase black-market traveling papers to escape to the US.

The conflict in this Rick-Ilsa-Victor love triangle is rich and complex, because we are sympathetic to all of them. Each man loves Ilsa, and Ilsa loves each of them. Each is a good man; neither of them is abusive or selfish. Both men respect each other, and know full well how the other feels about Ilsa. The only question is whether idealistic Rick or opportunistic Rick will call the shots for the film’s resolution. And the resolution is so perfect, in terms of both love and honor, that it has become one of the most famous, most iconic film scenes of all time.

Through all of that, Rick never tells Ilsa he loves her, but it’s vividly apparent in every look, every wince, every change in posture or vocal tone, and every choice his character makes.

The three leads–Humphrey Bogart as Rick, Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa, and Paul Henreid as Victor—give us an exquisite and complex set of relationships, but they are also supported by excellent performances in slightly smaller roles. Chief among these is Claude Rains as Louis, the French police captain who claims to be completely opportunistic, and even jokes about his own proclivities toward self-preservation. Indeed, he’s not wrong about that; he’s hardly a saint. He manipulates and extorts and blackmails and accommodates as well as any Nazi sympathizer ever has, with gracious good humor that masks some real insight into the people around him.

One of the film’s most amusing scenes happens when the visiting Nazi commander orders Louis to shut down Rick’s Cafe, and tells him to make up a reason to do so. Louis immediately blows his whistle and declares the establishment closed until further notice. An angry Rick demands to know what charge is being leveled at him, and Louis responds, “I am shocked—shocked!—to discover that gambling has been going on here!” At that exact moment, a dealer comes up to him and says, “Here are your winnings, Captain.” He says, “Oh thank you,” and pockets his money. But Louis, too, is deeper than he looks, and much of the story hinges on the push and pull between Louis and his better instincts. Louis is there at the climax of the film, making his own choices between self-interest and idealism. Claude Rains earned a much-deserved Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for this role.

And of course, the film would not have been what it was without Peter Lorre as Ugarte, a small-time black market dealer of travel papers, and Sam, who is not just Rick’s musician but his dear friend. It’s Ugarte who gives the travel papers, upon which the whole plot hinges, into Rick’s keeping. Ugarte also gives Rick the chance to demonstrate his motto, “I stick my neck out for nobody,” when he gets into more trouble than he can get himself out of. And Dooley Wilson as Sam provides the connection between Rick’s past and present, both as a catalyst for memory, and as the player of the soundtrack of Rick’s and Ilsa’s hearts. Sam’s panic when Ilsa first walks into Rick’s gives us our first clue that her presence there is going to be a problem for Rick.

An analysis of this film could go on for many chapters; indeed better film scholars than I have written about Casablanca extensively. There’s enough material here—cinematic, artistic, historic, sociological, psychological, symbolic, and more– to occupy a critic for a long time. I may take a stab at some of it in future articles, but I’ll let it go for now. I would like to point out, though that a preponderance of the 20^th century’s best films seem to have been directed by Michael Curtiz. Casablanca is his most famous, and arguably his best, but he also did Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), We’re No Angels (1955), White Christmas (1954), Life With Father (1947), Night and Day (1946), Mildred Pierce (1945), Santa Fe Trail (1940), Captains of the Clouds (1942), and one of the best pro-America war films (and one of the best films in general), Yankee Doodle Dandy, made in 1942, the same year as Casablanca. Curtiz deserves to go down, along with Frank Capra, as one of the great American directors of all time.