"Arsenic and Old Lace" and Adaptation Theory in Multi-Modal Storytelling: The First Movie Adaptation

1944 Movie Adaptation

The most well-known adaptation, the 1944 movie version, has some minor but significant differences from the play.

    For one, the bitter wartime humor and much of grandfather Brewster’s backstory is left out. It’s not too much extrapolation to say that this could be because of the shift in the civilian attitude of the current war as something winnable that had a coming end, rather than a grim perpetuity. Many of the characters are simplified, and much of the dark humor is gone, a change that could be contributed to a change in director from Bretaigne Windust to Frank Capra, or from scrutiny from the Hays Office, the moral code office of hollywood at the time (like Mortimer’s final line of “I’m a bastard!” being changed to “I’m the son of a sea cook!”).

    Some scenes were cut or shortened, most likely to keep the movie’s runtime under two hours. The largest change, however, was the movie’s shift from an ensemble cast to having a much stronger focus on Mortimer and Elaine’s romantic relationship, with both of their characterizations significantly altered. The movie gifts Mortimer with a strong distaste of marriage (which he quickly overcomes) absent in the play, and severely limits Elaine’s character from a worldly spitfire, to a much more placid girl-next-door.

    It is my belief that this adaptational choice also has to do with the larger societal context of the war for the time, in many ways, their own struggle mirrored that of many soldiers (some of who got to see the movie a month before its larger theatrical release) and their civilians at home: A happy domestic life is incredibly close to coming to fruition, but first they had to deal with trials and tribulations the likes of which they’d never seen, and do their best to be proper, ideal citizens while they did it. The civilian attitude of the war and the necessity of marriage had changed, and so the story had to change with it. However, an interesting thing to note about this slightly sanitized adaptation is that for all of it's scene cuts and word-mincing, the horror elements only alluded to in the play are highlighted. In a strangely sadistic scene, we watch as Jonathan snaps on black medical gloves, stroking his hand over a case of glinting surgical instruments as he looms over Mortimer, intricately tied to a chair. During the entry of the second world war, there was an uptick in noir films, a term given to the gritty and often violent crime dramas that gained immense popularity and signified the slow death of the Hays code, and the larger death of the cultural "innocence" before. America was seeing and hearing about war like never before, and in some ways, it made lasting changes in expanding what the public was normalized to seeing in world news.

Bibliography

Capra, Frank, director. Arsenic and Old Lace. Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., 1944

Blum, John Morton. V Was for Victory: politics and American culture during WWII. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1976.

Kesselring, Joseph. Arsenic and Old Lace. Dramatists Play Services Inc., 1941. 96 pages, et al.