Arsenic and Old Lace is a 1944 American screwball black comedy crime film directed by Frank Capra and starring Cary Grant.

[5][Note 1] The film's supporting cast also features Jack Carson, Priscilla Lane, Peter Lorre, and Edward Everett Horton.

Mortimer Brewster, a theater critic and author who has repeatedly denounced marriage as "an old-fashioned superstition", falls in love with Elaine Harper, his neighbor and a minister's daughter.

Elaine goes to her father's house to share the news of her marriage with him and pack for the honeymoon, while Mortimer visits his aunts, Abby and Martha, who raised him in the old family home.

They post a "Room for Rent" sign to attract a victim, then serve a glass of elderberry wine spiked with arsenic, strychnine, and cyanide while getting acquainted with them.

In addition to Mr. Hoskins, the aunts have murdered eleven other men; the bodies are buried in the cellar by Teddy, who believes they are yellow fever victims who died in the building of the Panama Canal.

Elaine is impatient to leave on their honeymoon to Niagara Falls but is concerned about Mortimer's increasingly odd behavior as he frantically attempts to control the situation.

[9] Capra scholar Matthew C. Gunter argues that the deep theme of both the play and film is the United States' difficulty in coming to grips with both the positive and negative consequences of the liberty it professes to uphold, and which the Brewsters demand.

The New York Times critic summed up the majority view, "As a whole, Arsenic and Old Lace, the Warner picture which came to the Strand yesterday, is good macabre fun.

"[1] Variety declared, "Capra's production, not elaborate, captures the color and spirit of the play, while the able writing team of Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein has turned in a very workable, tightly-compressed script.

"[14] Assessing the film in 1968, Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg state in Hollywood in the Forties that "Frank Capra provided a rather overstated and strained version of Arsenic and Old Lace".

[17] Arsenic and Old Lace was adapted as a half-hour radio play for the November 25, 1946, broadcast of The Screen Guild Theater with Boris Karloff and Eddie Albert.

[18] A one-hour adaptation was broadcast on January 25, 1948, on Ford Theatre, with Josephine Hull, Jean Adair, and John Alexander reprising their roles.