Monday at the Movies - October 29, 2012

Welcome to Week Thirty-Nine of “Monday at the Movies.”  With Halloween coming up this week, here are a few movies that suit the season.

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) – Directed by Frank Capra (of It’s a Wonderful Life fame), Arsenic and Old Lace is to Halloween what Die Hard is to Christmas – set on the night in question but with little to do with the actual holiday.  Instead, the film flies off on its own fantastic plot, in which the holiday decorations are only incidental.  Here, newlywed Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) finds his honeymoon plans deterred when he learns his aunts have a dead body in the window seat; throw in his homicidal brother Jonathan (Raymond Massey, disguised as Boris Karloff), another brother who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt, and a drunken Doctor Einstein (personal favorite Peter Lorre), and it’s madcap mania as only the Forties could provide.  Though the plot sounds grim, Arsenic and Old Lace is fantastically funny and is easily one of my favorite movies of all time.  Grant is at his slapstick best, chewing the scenery and pacing frenetically without being “too cool for the room.”  Massey is menacing within the boundaries of a comedy film, and Lorre is as always a scene-stealer of the highest order.  In fact, as with any great film, the supporting cast here is exceptionally strong, with no one performance falling below the bar of excellence set by the film.  The standout scene here is the one in which Jonathan and his aunts haggle over which has killed more people:  Aunts Abby and Martha agree that they’ve killed twelve people, while Jonathan insists he has thirteen kills to his name.  In any other movie, it’d be a dark and dismal moment, but in Arsenic and Old Lace it’s unbelievably hysterical, one in two-hour-long line of memorable scenes.  Now if someone could get on that remake with Robert Downey, Jr. I’ve been planning.

The Shining (1980) – Out of the fog and into the smog, The Shining is a more traditional choice for All Hallow’s Eve.  It’s Stanley Kubrick’s spookiest flick, loosely adapted from the Stephen King novel of the same name.  Whether you think the movie is about Native American genocide or how Kubrick faked the moon landing or if it’s just a story about a guy who goes nuts with his family in the mountains, The Shining is damned creepy.  Jack Nicholson stars as Jack Torrance, new caretaker of the Overlook Hotel during the off-season; slowly but inexorably, Jack is driven mad by the winter weather, the badgering of his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and the interference of potentially supernatural elements.  I first saw the film when I was too young to appreciate it, mistaking the film’s slow-burn approach to horror for sluggish, dry monotony.  As usually works for me, watching it with a crowd changed my perspective on the film, allowing me to savor the unsettling elements of the film and even appreciate the significant changes Kubrick made to the source material.  Nicholson’s performance is classic id, whose insane and wild-eyed mugging for the camera immortalized the “Here’s Johnny!” refrain.  Child actor Danny Lloyd, too, is a fine foil for Nicholson; his contemplative psychic ability is a pitch-perfect counterpoint to Nicholson’s agitated energy without ever allowing the audience to relax. It may not be the best Stephen King movie, but it’s one of Kubrick’s more enjoyable films.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!