Halloween has gradually become an occasion for horror movies, even as it has emerged as part of a new kind of autumn-worship very well catered to by every aspect of our commercial society. It may, in a secularizing America, even be making a run at Christmas’s place as the national holiday. Both of these tendencies somehow come from our rejection of authority, both the authority of the past and the authority of religion over both conscience and behavior.

　　But it might be better to reflect on Halloween and the conflict between our love of freedom and respect for the past from a comic point-of-view, avoiding the extremes of fear and pleasure we seek from our media today. So I recommend Frank Capras 1944 pictureArsenic and Old Lace, a classic slapstick comedy set on Halloween, starring Cary Grant and Priscilla Lane as all-American newlyweds who find they have a remarkable past to live down before they can even talk of a honeymoon.

　　Arsenic and Old Lace was very successful, both commercially and critically, as well as Capra’s last movie before he went to work for the Army during the Second World War. It was adapted from a very successful Broadway play, by the Epstein twins, who won the Oscar for writing Casablanca. The movie mixes innocence and sophistication in a way that was typical of cinema at that time, but which has been lost since—itself very revealing of the changes that have led Americans to take Halloween seriously rather than comically.

　　The WASPs

　　Arsenic and Old Lace is a humorous look at the older America of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant class. Humor indicates that the past isn’t simply respectable, but also, more subtly, that the future is uncertain, since it’s easier to laugh at old-fashioned conventions than to replace them. Over against the Old America of the WASPs, there is Twentieth-Century America, which is presented as a multi-ethnic democracy that includes immigrants, where the cops are Irish. The comedy takes place in Brooklyn, presented as the embodiment of quiet country life, as opposed to the modern metropolis of Manhattan. These are still different societies with different authorities, quaint ministers in one case, scientists and celebrity writers in the other.

　　Cary Grant plays Mortimer Brewster, a successful writer of anti-marriage polemics and heir to a respectable old WASP, not to say Puritan, name. He’s the tip of the spear of Manhattan modernization—a confirmed bachelor, sophisticated, independent, and on top of the world—but he’s also the product of centuries of good breeding, in every sense of the word. He’s also the butt of this comedy, because he lacks self-awareness; his failures of understanding turn out to be great opportunities for the audience to get a kind of tour of America’s past and future, as new to him as to us, over the course of one strange day and night.

　　We meet Mortimer in a line, queuing up to get a marriage license. As a man, he’s loath to lose his freedom, and as a celebrity, he’s worried about paparazzi, since his notoriety is in danger—he might be accused of that worst sin, hypocrisy. In both capacities, he wants to escape conventional authority and the claim the community lays on him; Mortimer wants to be his own man. So he gets married to his childhood sweetheart against his better judgment. His decision is a bit of a surprise to him, and not entirely a welcome one. He chafes at being in the same boat as everyone else, whereas the women we see in the opening scene are more patient, wink at each other, and implicitly at us, and therefore get what they want.

　　Married, Mortimer wants to share the news with his family in sleepy Brooklyn. His aunts Martha and Abby live across from his wife’s home, separated by a quaint cemetery with a sycamore tree. With them lives his brother Teddy, who is nuts—he believes he’s Theodore Roosevelt and constantly charges up the stairs as though up San Juan Hill. The Brewster family gives us the notion that respectable people live in the past, reliving old glories as Teddy keeps repeating TR’s great deeds. But Mortimer finds a corpse in the window seat while looking for the notes on a book he’s looking to write, and this shocking discovery leads to hilarity. On Halloween, the dead haunt us, of course, and in a way the national skeletons come out of the WASPs’ closet. As the class with authority in America, the WASPs take it personally.

　　The movie’s comic genre, the Halloween setting, the search for happiness all point to the limits of the ordinary middle-class way of life and our dissatisfaction with it, however much we wish to preserve and enjoy it.

　　The shock of the story is that Mortimer’s old aunts, spinsters considered the soul of charity by the entire neighborhood, have taken to the habit of ministering to lonely old men with nothing in the world by giving them lodging, elderberry wine, and killing them with poison. The “mercy killing” of what we euphemistically call “assisted suicide” has become distressingly more common in Western societies, and so Arsenic and Old Lace has also become perhaps timelier than it has been since it first delighted audiences. Moreover, our elite institutions in culture, law, and science are as much in question now as they are in the movie, so we could take the satire as directed to us, not just to a stodgy old Victorian past.

　　Mortimer spends the movie trying to cover up the Brewster family madness and save respectability, but gradually comes to feel hes himself going mad as he tries to juggle an increasing cast of comical characters. First it’s his family and in-laws, his aunts (played by Jean Adair and Josephine Hull) and nutty brother (John Alexander), as well as his newlywed and already neglected wife and her reverend father. But then the problem gets out of control and we are introduced to the community, from local Irish beat cops (James Gleason and Jack Carson) to a judge and the director of an insane asylum (Edward Everett Horton). Finally, to add horror to Halloween, a long lost brother (Raymond Massey), an insane criminal who looks like Boris Karloff, that is to say, like Frankenstein’s monster, shows up and brings with him a drunk European doctor called Einstein (played by the delightful Peter Lorre, a star of German cinema who was then shooting to fame in Hollywood with roles in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca). The more Mortimer tries to save the situation, the zanier it gets, of course, until it’s one big happy circus.

　　The Married Estate and Democracy

　　Why should it all be so hard for a couple that has every desirable quality—youth, health, beauty, respectability, decency, and wealth? Well, Mortimer’s marriage is itself a funny contradiction. He is a celebrity writer of books like The Bachelor’s Bible and Mind Over Matrimony, encouraging a revolution against the old morality of church and home, preparing for the rather un-Christian America in which we now live. But he fell in love with the girl next door, who is also a minister’s daughter. She is not the authority against which he rails, but the temptation to which he succumbs—she is less innocent than he thinks, but also more natural. He has the American man’s fight in him when it comes to institutions telling him what to do, but he cannot help himself when his heart starts beating a little faster. Freedom is a funny thing.

　　The comic genre, the Halloween setting, the search for happiness all point to the limits of the ordinary middle-class way of life and our dissatisfaction with it, however much we wish to preserve and enjoy it. Mortimer thinks himself an intellectual above the bourgeoisie, but in fact depends on their society and tries every which way to preserve its respectability once he sees his family is in danger. He’s much more conventional than he realizes. But this attempt reveals a danger that stems from the attempt to moralize life, to clamp down on everything deemed “crazy” by an unreflective middle class. Authorities such as medicine and the courts, science and law become Mortimer’s shield against the reality he’s supposed to face, and without facing it he cannot really be part of the future, either as an intellectual or as a husband.

　　All this is tied up with democracy as much as with marriage, with public things as well as private. America cannot long endure the restraints of the WASP institutions. Respectability can blind people to the dangers of massive social changes. Our current elites are attempting something very similar to Mortimer in using the language of therapy and the claim that people are becoming radicalized by technology in order to censor the democratic revolution we are seeing in politics as much as on social media. But Mortimer is both chastened and moved to action, in a way in which our elites aren’t, being both paralyzed and arrogant.

　　The comedy suggests love is more essential to family than respectability, since the latter depends on the past—memories and imagination—rather than experience and passion. Moreover, it holds up the spontaneous as a better sign of our nature than the opinions that gain credence in our institutions. This isn’t intended to revolutionize the past, but to wake people up to present conditions, and to offer a guide for conduct and perhaps even to thought, in a situation where authority is contested and people feel confused. This also includes a preference for democracy and freedom, because there is more opportunity to correct mistakes if we’re not forever trying to hide what’s wrong with us and pretend to be as beautiful as our images of the past.

　　The silly farce is also a witty satire on respectability. Comedy shows itself in a way superior to drama, and although it is crass, it is also subtle. Capra deserves our applause just as much for his insights as for making us laugh. He is the most famous immigrant among the great directors in Hollywood and the screenwriters, the Epstein twins, were also the sons of Jewish immigrants. Capra’s great success only fed his patriotism, but he still had the capacity to look at America from the distance of the stranger. That’s true in a way of the original play, written by Kesselring, a German immigrant, but his idea was more of a black comedy, more in tune with our times than the 1940s, too eager to blame the past and not sufficiently grateful for everything it’s made possible. Capra’s taste is better and deserves more respect, and it is also a pleasure we could share, and therefore a public service.