Trivia / Arsenic and Old Lace

• Billing Displacement: Priscilla Lane (Elaine) and Jack Carson (Officer O'Hara) are billed second and fourth respectively due to being major Warner Bros. stars in 1944, in spite of playing decidedly secondary characters.
• Money, Dear Boy: Inverted— Cary Grant was so dissatisfied with his performance in this movie that he donated his entire salary from it to charity rather than profit from it at all. This was not the first time, either — in 1940, he donated his entire salary from The Philadelphia Story to the British war effort. For this film he donated it to the American effort.
• Playing Against Type: Cary Grant, who usually plays suave and sophisticated characters, in the movie plays a character who starts out like that, but becomes increasingly panicked and flustered as the story goes on.
  • Director Frank Capra is best known for uplifting, romantic, yet intelligent films. Here he directs a Black Comedy about a family of psychopaths.
• Referenced by...: In Runaways, when the group tried to use codenames, Gert called herself "Arsenic" and her Deinonychus partner "Old Lace". She has dropped it, but the dinosaur still answers to that.
• Uncredited Role: The play was heavily rewritten by its producers Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, a well-known Broadway writing team (behind The Sound of Music among other hits), but Kesselring retained sole credit as author.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Frank Capra originally wanted Bob Hope to play Mortimer in the film, but Hope was under contract with Paramount, who refused to loan him out. Jack Benny and Ronald Reagan were also considered for the role before they settled on Grant.
  • Boris Karloff couldn't reprise his role in the film because he was still under contract to perform in the stage play.

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