The Man Is a Distraction

Cary Grant…mmmmmmm…give me a moment…

…the man is a distraction.

The man needs a monument. Or, better still, the man needs a monument in a park. Bag Lady fears would be somewhat soothed by the thought of bedding down under the solid eyes of such immovable masculinity. Jaded woman (and men so inclined) can sit and sleep on a strategically placed bench and give a stony Cary wistful, winsome glances.

Ever watched Arsenic And Old Lace? The 1944 release featuring the flawless, comic timing of Cary, the insatiably watchable and delicious Cary?

A long long time ago, I borrowed a stretched video tape of Arsenic And Old Lace from the local library at least three times before it was withdrawn because everyone had thrown out their VCR players and migrated to DVD. 

A short synopsis:

A newly married Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) visits his two charitable, sweetly-trotting-from-kitchen-to-living-room aunts. Not only do the aunts lay a table beautifully, they also lay old bachelors to rest with their irresistible homemade elderberry wine (the elderberries appropriately harvested from the cemetery trees) laced with arsenic.

In their opinion, one less lonely widow, or otherwise solitary, aged gentlemen, is one less pitiful sorrow in this world. They’re altruistic serial murderesses, you might say.

The corpses are laid to rest in the cellar, where the appealingly insane sisters have sent Teddy, their delusional, equally insane brother, to dig the Panama Canal (he believes he is Theodore Roosevelt).

The plot thickens with the entrance of yet another homicidal member of the family…

But we’ll dispense with those details…this synopsis is getting longer than the stairs to the cellar.

To view, in grainy black and white, Mortimer’s discovery of a body, and the subsequent distressing revelations about his aunts’ lethal hobby, visit the aunts’ innocuous looking home for 4 minutes.

To imagine Cary’s pleasingly full bottom lip silencing your alarm as he does his new bride’s, spy on them for two minutes here. You’ll also witness his euphoria after his aunts tell him he is not truly a Brewster, but the illegitimate son of a sea cook, and therefore spared their fate of going to the Happy Dale Sanatorium.

Time for a stiff cup of coffee laced with vanilla. Have a wonderful weekend. 

xxx ❤ TeaShell Michele