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Arsenic and Old Lace, the 1941 - 1944 Walter Wagner Broadway stage play family relationship mental illness murder mystery black comedy (written by Joseph Kesselring) starring Boris Karloff, Josephine Hull, Anthony Ross, Jean Adair, John Alexander, Wyrley Birch, Helen Brooks, and Edgar Stehli. Note that there is a fascinating story about this play. The way that the producers of the show got Boris Karloff to play a leading role in it was by giving him a profit participation in the show. The producers then sold the movie rights to it. But that created a problem, because Boris Karloff rightly assumed that releasing the movie version would hurt the box office of the Broadway version, so he wisely had written into the contract that the movie could not be released until the Broadway play stopped running (which usually lasted at most six months). He also refused to be in the film version because he again rightfully assumed that people would be less likely to go to see him in the stage version if they could wait and see him in the movie version! So the movie was filmed in 1941, and the producers thought it would be released later that year, but it wasn't released to theaters until 1944, when the Broadway show finally ended its run (though, interestingly enough, the film was still released to U.S. troops between 1941 and 1944, because Karloff allowed that since he was a patriotic American!). But one certainly wishes that Karloff had made the movie, because even though Raymond Massey was fine, Karloff would have been far superior, because the role was specifically written for him (about a criminal who has plastic surgery that makes him look like Frankenstein!).

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