Arsenic and Old Lace

Apart from epics, great films are, at base, rom coms or thrillers. You might find exceptions pretty easily but I think that's a starting point for a theory of endurable films. To make a canonical film, you need to have a love story or a thriller plot.

Think of the great comedies from classic films. The Apartment, Some Like It Hot, that sort of thing. Alternatively, to make it into the canon, you need to be Hitchcock.

Arsenic and Old Lace has a bit of both. But it is not a great film. There are great rom coms that are in a farce sub genre and the same is perhaps true of the thrillers, although the examples seem more obvious in books.

Arsenic and Old Lace however is more of a pure farce and this is not an easy genre to make in film. For one thing, the doors just don't slam properly when it's not live and in person.

It also comes up against another problem of films. Adapting plays is hugely difficult, The Odd Couple and Twelve Good Men aside.

The twist at the end of Act II is the sort of thing that you ought to see coming but don't. At that point the farce flips from comic to suspenseful, and then quickly back again. Many of the jokes are about theatre tropes, and there is a lot of genre pastiche that is inherently less meaningful when filmed. There is also a twist in Act III that, in a theatre, would be hilarious and compelling, but which lost some effect on screen. The ending is excellent.

I wasn't able to watch the Cary Grant version, because copyright law is absurd, so many of the effects I describe here may be better in that version.

It's still a great script and if you are interested in the comedy crime genre, it's a must watch.