Films involving Disfigurement

Disfigurement: Minor Films

Title	Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
Alternative/Original Title
Disability	Mental Schizophrenia? Psychopath Disfigurement
Country	USA
Length	158
Genre	Comedy
Rating	5
Director	Frank Capra
Cast	Cary Grant Raymond Massey Peter Lorre Priscilla Lane Jean Adair Josephine Hull
Notes	A comic masterpiece with a pace and lack of sentimentality not found in some of Capra's other films (Pauline Kael calls it "a laborious farce"). Grant is stretched to his limit and then some as the sane nephew of two old dears who invite tramps for tea and then kill them. They also all share a brother who believes he is Theodore Roosevelt. Grant has just got married when he discovers that his respectable aunts have a body in a chest under the window, and that they have killed 11 others. Caught between telling the police and not wanting his bride to know what an insane family he comes from he helps them cover up the murder. But then on the scene arrives his older brother, Jonathon, (Massey) who has escaped from gaol where he was held for murder. Accompanying him is Dr. Einstein (Lorre) who has given him a botched face-lift leaving Jonathon's face covered in scars making him look even more evil (one of the policemen involved says he looks like Boris Karloff who in fact played the role in the stage play). Running through the whole is the theme of hereditary insanity and Grant is overjoyed when he discovers he was adopted. His last line "Darling, I'm a bastard" was cut by the censors. One wonders what they'd have done to Ibsen's "Ghosts".

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