Film 973: Arsenic and Old Lace

Trivia: Cary Grant donated his entire salary, $100,000, to the U.S. War Relief Fund.

Ronald Reagan and Jack Benny were offered the role of Mortimer Brewster, but turned it down. Bob Hope was offered the part and was eager to do it but Paramount Pictures refused to loan him out to Warner Bros. for the project.

Cary Grant considered his acting in this film to be horribly over the top and often called it his least favorite of all his movies.

On stage, Boris Karloff played the monstrous Jonathan Brewster, Raymond Massey's film character, who, in eerie-looking screen makeup, resembled Karloff, which was a running gag throughout the picture. Because Karloff was still appearing in the Broadway play during the film's production, he was unable to do the picture.

When Mortimer is sitting in the graveyard, one of the tombstones has the name Archie Leach on it. Archie Leach is Cary Grant's real name.

Jonathan describes one of his killings and Dr. Einstein says "You can't count him. He died of pneumonia," then Jonathan replies "He wouldn't have died of pneumonia if I hadn't shot him." This connects to the United States Presidents theme in the film. In 1881, President James Garfield was shot by a drifter named Charles Guiteau. Garfield recovered from the wound, only to catch pneumonia from tainted surgical tools, and died 79 days after the shooting. Guiteau's courtroom defense was that Garfield died of pneumonia; the verdict was, in effect, that Garfield wouldn't have died of pneumonia if Guiteau hadn't shot him. Guiteau was sent to the execution dock in 1882.

Film 906: His Girl Friday

Trivia: The famous in-joke about Ralph Bellamy's character ("He looks like that actor...Ralph Bellamy!") was almost left on the cutting room floor: Harry Cohn, the studio head, saw the dailies and responded in fury at the impertinence, but he let Howard Hawks leave it in, and it has always been one of the biggest laughs in the film.

One of the first, if not the first, films to have characters talk over the lines of other characters, for a more realistic sound. Prior to this, movie characters completed their lines before the next lines were started.

In the play the film was based on ("The Front Page"), the part of Hildy was played by a man. When director Howard Hawks was planning to make the film, he was going to cast a man. While auditioning actors, a secretary would read the lines belonging to Hildy. Hawks loved the words coming from a woman so much, they decided to rewrite the part for a woman.

Rosalind Russell thought, while shooting, that she didn't have as many good lines as Cary Grant had, so she hired an advertisement writer through her brother-in-law and had him write more clever lines for the dialog. Since Howard Hawks allowed for spontaneity and ad-libbing, he, and many of the cast and crew didn't notice it, but Grant knew she was up to something, leading him to greet her every morning: "What have you got today?"

Rosalind Russell resented the fact that she wasn't the first choice to play Hildy for director Howard Hawks. She showed up to the audition with her hair wet from swimming.

Voted #10 in Total Film's 100 Greatest Movies Of All Time list (November 2005).