Arsenic & Old Lace is a 1969 American television film directed by Robert Scheerer and starring Helen Hayes, Lillian Gish, Fred Gwynne, Sue Lyon, Jack Gilford and David Wayne.
[2][3] The story is a black comedy in which drama critic Mortimer Brewster (Crane) discovers that his two elderly spinster aunts Abby and Martha (Hayes and Gish, respectively), who live in a house in Brooklyn, have been poisoning their lonely male guests.
Fred Gwynne of Munsters fame played Jonathan Brewster, the role originated on Broadway by Boris Karloff, the star of the 1931 horror classic Frankenstein.
Jonathan Brewster is described by the other characters as resembling Karloff, who had played the role on television once before, in a 1955 adaptation for the CBS anthology series The Best of Broadway.
[4] The 1969 version was updated to contemporary times by having Crane's character meet Sue Lyon in a discotheque at the beginning.