Arsenic and Old Lace

I'm a huge fan of movies from the 30's - 50's.  Recently I've been utilizing netfilx (watching instantly) to re-discover favorites and explore new ones.

Last night while painting I pop up my old buddy netfilx and discovered "Arsenic and Old Lace" starting...

Cary Grant (swooning) 

Priscilla Lane

Josephine Hull

Jean Adair

Raymond Massey

Peter Lorre

John Alexander

There are a few other cast of characters I recognize from my beloved "I Love Lucy".  This was a film adaption of a play of the same name that ran on Broadway.

Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) falls in love with Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane), who grew up next door to him in Brooklyn, and, on Halloween day, they marry.

Immediately after the wedding, Mortimer visits the bizarre relatives who still live in his old family home: his elderly aunts Abby (Josephine Hull) and Martha (Jean Adair), and his brother Teddy (John Alexander), who believes he is Theodore Roosevelt

Mortimer finds a corpse hidden in a window seat and assumes that Teddy has committed murder under somedelusion, but his aunts explain that they are responsible ("It's one of our charities"). They have developed what Mortimer calls the "very bad habit" of ending the presumed suffering of lonely old bachelors by serving them elderberry wine spiked with arsenic, strychnine and "just a pinch of cyanide". The bodies are buried in the basement by Teddy, who believes he is digging locks for the Panama Canal and burying yellow fever victims

To complicate matters further, Mortimer's brother Jonathan (Raymond Massey) arrives with his alcoholic accomplice, plastic surgeon Dr. Herman Einstein (Peter Lorre). Jonathan is a psychotic murderer trying to escape the police and find a place to dispose of the corpse of his latest victim

Jonathan, upon finding out his aunts' secret, decides to bury Spenalzo in the cellar (to which Abby and Martha object vehemently, because their victims were all nice gentlemen) and soon declares his intention to kill Mortimer

But eventually Jonathan is arrested, while Teddy and the two aunts are safely consigned to an asylum. Finally, Abby and Martha inform Mortimer that he is not biologically related to the Brewsters after all: His real father worked as a chef on a steamship. In the film's closing scene, after lustily kissing Elaine and before whisking her away to their honeymoon, he gleefully exclaims "I'm not a Brewster, I'm a son of a sea cook!"

~courtesy of wikipedia~

I highly recommend checking it out.

XO,

K