Arsenic and Old Lace

Mortimer Brewster is a theatre critic and author who has spent years arguing that marriage is a mistake. He nevertheless marries Elaine Harper, and before the couple leave for their honeymoon he takes her to meet his two elderly aunts, Abby and Martha, with whom he grew up in the family's large Brooklyn house. The visit turns into something other than a polite introduction. The aunts, outwardly kindly and charitable, have been poisoning lonely older men who come to their door and burying the bodies in the cellar, an arrangement their nephew Teddy, who believes he is Theodore Roosevelt, assists without understanding it. Mortimer must work out what to do about the growing number of corpses while keeping his new wife from learning what kind of family she has joined. A further complication arrives in the form of his brother Jonathan, a murderer who has just escaped from prison.

Frank Capra directed the film, which followed Why We Fight: Prelude to War (1942) among the features he made, and he produced it with Jack L. Warner for Warner Bros. Pictures. The screenplay was written by Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein. Cary Grant plays Mortimer, with Priscilla Lane as Elaine, Josephine Hull and Jean Adair as the aunts, Raymond Massey as Jonathan and John Alexander as Teddy.

The film had a budget of about one million dollars. On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.9 out of 10 from roughly 79,000 votes, and on TMDB a rating of 7.6 from about a thousand votes. A critics' rating of 7.8 from 37 reviews places it close to those audience scores.