November 4, 2024 • 48 mins
This week, we are comparing Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) and The Ladykillers (2004), two films about suspicious goings on in the houses (and cellars) of elderly women.
-----
The Movies:
Directed by Frank Capra
Written by Julius J. Epstein
Based on the play by Joseph Kesselring
iMDb Rating: 7.9
Directed by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
Written by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Based on the original screenplay by William Rose
iMDB Rating: 6.2
-----
Find us on:
Discord - https://discord.gg/dxgmcfj552
Tumblr - @ItTakesTwoPod
Instagram - @ItTakesTwo_pod
Facebook - @ItTakesTwoPod
Youtube - @ittakestwonz
Our website - ItTakesTwo.co.nz
-----
Content Warning:
Mentions of death, violence, murder, injury, and war
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Music
(00:19):
Hi everyone, I'm Lisa.
And I'm Nick.
And you're listening to It Takes Two, the podcast where two people take two movies with the same plot or premise and watch and discuss them.
Still Halloween, I believe.
Oh, it's November when this is coming out.
Early November.
Very early. You're still in the spirit.
These seem like Halloween movies to you today.
(00:40):
Little bit.
Well, one of them is literally set on Halloween.
Fair, fair.
Today in this episode, we are covering 2004's The Lady Killers, directed by the Coen Brothers, and an absolute classic of black and white cinema, Arseneke and Old Place from 1944.
(01:01):
I love Arseneke and Old Place.
Legitimately. I was thinking about it when we were watching it. I think it might literally be my favorite classic film.
I don't know if people counted it as a classic film.
And this is not the only one I've seen. I've seen a lot of old movies. I'm a big fan of Buster Keaton in particular.
So I've seen a lot of silent era cinema. I did essays on post-war British cinema. There's a lot of good movies back then, but Arseneke and Old Place is definitely probably top spot for me, I think.
(01:36):
See, this sort of falls into the same category. I was thinking like another movie we've watched. I think it was the Friends group, wasn't it? The movie crew? What's Up, Doc?
Oh, What's Up, Doc is fun.
And then I was thinking about Duck Soup as well. Good classic movies.
(01:57):
Anyway, let's jump into these movies.
Oh yeah, so the connection between these. I feel like I haven't done this for the last couple of episodes.
I don't think it's as necessary.
Yeah, but it's nice to have a summary at the beginning of, hey, this is why we chose these two.
Because Ladykillers is actually a remix. We might end up doing it with the original Ladykillers in the future.
(02:20):
But essentially, the linked plot between these is that there is some illegal shit happening in the basement of an old lady's house.
And people don't believe the old ladies when they talk about the illegal shit that's going on. And lots of dead people are involved.
(02:44):
I will let you know the audience, not Lisa, because Lisa already knows. If you haven't seen Arseneck and Old Lace, I highly recommend watching the movie.
Even if you have to turn this podcast episode off. It's an experience, especially in this era of film that sort of doesn't happen anymore.
(03:07):
Because it was a Broadway show, so it was designed to be a stage play. And it is very obvious from the framing, the set design.
Everything about it screams like one angle camera. And the physical comedy of it all is so amazing.
(03:29):
Can I tell you, I'm going to jump straight into some trivia. Not like big trivia, but Cary Grant fucking hates this movie.
Really? He thinks it's like the worst performance he'd ever done.
Because he thinks he went way over the top on it. And it was like due to the director pushing him.
And they were supposed to do reshoots, but then they all enlisted in the army and left.
(03:51):
Which we can circle back to that part later. So they never did the reshoots.
And his hand up over the top performance is what got kept in it. And it's his least favorite of all his performances.
But there's so many. We've seen it together multiple times. I've seen it way more than that before we were in a relationship.
Legitimately one of my favorite movies of all time. And there's so many moments in this movie where Cary Grant has a look on his face that I crack up.
(04:21):
Just his whole facial expression, his physicality, the way he reacts to things.
And there's moments where he is totally silent and just acting with his eyes or with his body language.
And to me I think it's my favorite performance of his. I mean I probably haven't seen that many Cary Grant movies.
But I just think it's absolutely spectacular. Up there is probably one of the top comedic acting performances of all time.
(04:52):
For me. For those who haven't seen it, there's a GIF and it reminds me very much of his performance in this.
There's a Japanese game show where these people are stuck in a room and they have to find what things are made out of chocolate.
Is that where he bites the door handle? He bites the door handle and his face just completely changes from confusion to success.
(05:16):
And it is so much in certain scenes in this movie. I think you could make a GIF out of literally every shot of Cary Grant on screen in this movie.
And it would make a perfect reaction GIF to anything. It's genuinely spectacular. It's like a master class in physical acting for me.
And it's so funny to me that he hated it. He thought it was his worst ever performance. Maybe he just needed to see it from a modern lens.
(05:47):
We needed Cary Grant to watch that movie in the 2020s and go holy shit that was peak comedy. Genuinely spectacular.
On the flip side of that, I feel like Tom Hanks' performance was a bit sloppy.
Tom Hanks in Lady Killers is bizarre, but it's also like the least Tom Hanks I've seen him.
(06:14):
Yeah, I would agree.
Which is a good thing, I think. I think he needs to not just be the same person everything.
I hope that he enjoyed it. I didn't find anything out about how much Tom Hanks liked or didn't like his performance.
But I feel like it would have been fun to do something totally different to every other Tom Hanks performance.
(06:36):
So I'm going to jump to premise just for the audience. So massive spoilers. So if you haven't seen Ars Nick and Old Blaze, I recommend stopping now.
Okay. So Ars Nick and Old Blaze starts on Halloween and the main character is a famous writer who hates relationships and is very anti-relationships.
(07:04):
And he also reviews plays.
Yeah, he's a theatre critic, but he also is like he's written books against marriage.
Yeah. So he's madly in love with his next door neighbor and they're literally at the office, registry office to get a marriage license.
So he's head over heels. He goes back to where he's living, which is with his aunts.
(07:32):
Well, he's not living there.
He's not living there?
No, because the aunts are meeting with her dad, who's the pastor, and saying he used to only visit us once a month.
And now that they're together, he's here six days a week visiting.
So I think it's where he grew up in that home, but he's living elsewhere and being a theatre critic in New York.
(07:54):
Yeah, because I sit in Brooklyn.
And then you, yeah, he so his aunts, again, massive spoiler, are serial killers and they poison people and bury them in the basement.
The way they're getting away with this is his cousin.
(08:16):
Brother.
Teddy's his brother.
Teddy's his brother.
Teddy thinks he's Theodore Roosevelt.
Yeah.
And is Theodore Roosevelt the entire time.
And he thinks he's he thinks he's digging the Panama Canal in the basement.
I did have a moment, by the way, watching this, because we've been talking about Bubba Hoetep on and off.
(08:39):
And I keep saying, like, there is no movie that we can compare to Bubba Hoetep, because what other movie has like a black guy in a wheelchair who thinks he's JFK?
And then I was like, well, this guy thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt.
But I mean, that's where the similarities are.
But I just just thought I'd bring that up.
So, yes, it's this this realization of him trying to get his brother committed.
(09:00):
His other brother, who is also a murderer with like massive surgical scars on his face because his sidekick is performing plastic surgery on him basically monthly as he's sitting around thinking about his brother and killing people.
And just shenanigans ensue because he's trying to get his brother committed to a mental institution.
(09:28):
Teddy. Teddy. His brother is there to murder everybody.
Jonathan, the other brother.
Yeah. His aunts are insane.
The police keep rocking up.
He's also like really abusive to his new newly wedded wife.
I think.
Because he's so like focused on like his brother committed and all the dead bodies that are in the house.
(09:51):
I think it's just that like he has literally like his mind has just like split with this discovery because he discovers this all starts to unfold because he discovers a body in the window seat at the aunts house.
And he assumes that his brother Teddy, who he thinks he's here to Roosevelt, has killed someone.
And then it finds out that his aunts did it.
(10:12):
And he's like, what? And this is the day that he was eloping and he's got the cab outside ready to go on his honeymoon.
And it's just like his brain just shuts off.
So we can see from how they are before then that like he's not he hasn't been abusive towards her.
That's not like dynamic of the relationship.
(10:33):
He just like doesn't want her to find out about this.
And then also is like so focused on like how do I fix this problem?
And you can kind of tell that that's his that has been his role in the family the whole time,
even though his aunts have been the people who've like raised him and his brother and have been, you know, like caretakers.
(10:54):
You can tell that he's the one responsible person in the family and he's the one looking after his aunts and you know, making sure that his brother is OK and etc.
It's also very interesting because this doesn't come up until like Act Three. Again, spoilers.
He's not actually a Brewster. Yes.
(11:15):
He's like adopted into the family because he's the illegitimate son of a seabot captain.
So his his mother arrived to work as a cook for them pregnant, already pregnant with him. And then.
His the person he thought was his dad growing up, who is a Brewster, married her to get her out of that situation.
(11:41):
And her I think her the thought his actual biological father is and also a cook, but on a on a ship.
Yeah. And that was the reason he was also hesitant to get married, because he realized his insanity runs in his family.
Yeah. And she was just like, no, you're the most normal one.
Like, it's not until that realization of, hey, I'm actually adopted. I'm not completely insane.
(12:07):
Yeah. Like the rest of my family, I can like be happy.
At that part at the end of the movie already, the line that he shouts out the window where he's like, I'm not a Brewster. I'm the son of a she cook.
Yeah. He was a line originally was I'm not a Brewster. I'm a bastard.
And the censorship office would not let them.
(12:30):
Moving on to the movie, we've movie with this movie, The Lady Killers.
The Lady Killers. It's also yeah, it's also a very weird ensemble cast.
You've got Tom Hicks playing a southern gentleman who's also like pretending, pretending maybe to be like some sort of PhD professor, a guy who's on hiatus.
(12:53):
And basically the only evidence that we've got throughout the entire movie is he's the brains of this criminal organization.
He literally just like decided he wanted to do it and put an ad out in the newspaper and got like a weird hodgepodge.
All I was going to say is the only thing he can do is quote Edgar Allan Poe.
(13:14):
Yeah, he does quote Edgar Allan Poe and then ironically, major spoilers, ironically gets killed by a raven.
Yeah. Yeah. He's got like some henchmen, which like your boy, your boy, your favorite boy.
J.K. Simmons. J.K. Simmons plays a very bizarre character named Mr. Pancakes.
(13:37):
Yes. I don't know.
Garth Pancakes. Garth Pancakes, I think is his name.
Yeah, Marlon Waynes and he's played Gawain.
Yeah, who's playing like the inside man who's working at this casino.
Yeah. And he rents a room, pretends to be a gospel band, but it's like Renaissance music.
(14:00):
It's not gospel. They're just supposed to allegedly playing like all Renaissance instruments and stuff like weird, weird ass instruments.
Yeah. And then what he plays is like a string quartet. So it doesn't even make any sense.
Yeah. And so they're hiding in the basement covering up the fact they're digging to the offices where the boat is a boat casino.
(14:23):
Yeah. Yeah. Because they have a they talk about how in Mississippi you can't have a casino on land.
Yeah. So the casino is on a boat. Yes.
And then the money is brought into this vault in this office.
And they just like tunnel in and get into weird shenanigans the entire way through.
Yeah. Yeah. And then it becomes a real comedy of errors toward the end.
(14:45):
Yes. When and everything starts to go wrong.
When do you want to jump into that?
I don't know. How do you feel these compared to each other? Do you think that the plots are similar enough for them to make sense on this podcast together?
Because this is one that I hadn't seen in Lady Colors and I had seen this come up as like suggestion movies that are similar.
(15:11):
And I love arsenic and all that. So I jumped on the chance to be like, yeah, let's watch something with arsenic and all that.
It's definitely an interesting there is a bit of a stretch realistically.
Crime is happening in the basement and it doesn't revolve around digging.
And there are bodies and it is an old lady's house. Yeah.
And there is like disposal of bodies without people seeing what they're doing and stuff like that.
(15:35):
Yeah. But it is very much like an ensemble.
It's not really a heist movie because there's no like crew parts.
I did worry at the beginning of it when they do it because they do like an ensemble intro like it's Rat Race or something.
And then they do and then it's setting up this heist, a casino heist.
And I was like, this is more like a shitty Ocean's Eleven than Arsenal Lace.
(16:02):
Like the only thing is going for that is like in an old lady's house.
I did hope that she was going to it was going to turn out she was killing people.
I thought that would be funny. Yeah.
Ironically, it's called The Lady Killers and No Ladies Get Killed.
Yeah, it is very interesting.
That was sort of like the takeaway I took from it as well.
(16:23):
It's like no ladies were harmed in the filming of this movie called The Lady Killers.
I mean, that's like, oh, I was going to absolutely spoil another movie where the title is.
Oh, I can. Here we go.
Oh, no, because that one is true. I was going to say Rosencrested Guns are Dead.
But there are movies out there where the title is leading you to expect something to happen that doesn't actually happen in it.
(16:45):
I'm not going to name the movie.
There's a movie that you got me to watch that you have on your shelf out there.
We can talk about it after.
But it put me even saying the title of the movie after saying that would be a spoiler.
So John dies at the end.
God damn it. I was not saying it.
Yes. Yes.
Spoiler for John dies at the end. John doesn't die at the end.
(17:10):
So I understand the concept of calling it The Lady Killers to set up us to expect that this lady is going to get killed.
And then she never does.
They do try.
They certainly do try.
That's the whole kind of second act is that she finds out that they've committed this, that they've done this heist.
(17:31):
It's still one point six million dollars and it's in her basement and she's just like, no, you've got two choices.
You can like surrender.
Return the money and come to church with me or go to jail for the rest of your life.
Yeah.
Can we talk about the part that made you physically uncomfortable?
The guy eating a cigarette. Yeah.
(17:53):
It's horrible. I don't know.
It's like it happens.
I mean, he gets his comeuppance because he does it like three or four times in the movie because she says no smoking in the house.
So every time she's coming in, he just feels like I feel sick talking about it.
He just like puts the cigarette in his mouth.
He just like sucks it into his. I can't talk about it.
I genuinely I'm picturing it and it's making me gag.
(18:17):
Oh, he's got like a cigarette hooked like in his front teeth and it like flips into the back of his mouth.
Why do you want to talk about that?
Because it's making you feel ill and that's fun to me because I'm mean to you sometimes.
Horrible.
People with love.
Yeah, spoiler alert, the guy chokes on a cigarette and falls on the stairs.
(18:38):
No, that was and then he tries to he drinks the water next to her bedside table and it's got false teeth in it.
And then he falls down the stairs and dies.
Serves him right for making me feel sick by putting the cigarette inside his mouth.
I can't say it. It's awful. I'm just thinking about it.
(18:59):
That has no plot relevance. It's just upsetting.
Yeah, J.K. Simmons characters very weird.
All the characters are very weird.
Yeah, the whole like IBS thing coming through and act toe the fact that he's like works in commercials and his partner works with explosives.
(19:27):
And he met her at an IBS singles conference.
Yeah. Spoilers, obviously.
Honestly, actually, I think we really should do this as a remix episode at some point because I can't imagine any of that is in the original.
And I would love to know what the original version is.
(19:50):
Because there's no way the J.K. Simmons character, if he exists, is anything like any of it is the same as what we've gotten this one.
Yeah, what a bizarre character.
His entire introduction is also super bizarre because he like suffocates an English bulldog.
Which is very upsetting.
And Bruce Campbell is there as like the Humane Society rep.
(20:13):
Yeah.
Just bunzies. Just like hanging out.
Yeah.
No lines.
It's a very bizarre sequence.
Yeah. And yeah, just I don't know. It's a very weird movie because like it does feel just like a constant comedy of errors.
(20:36):
Yeah, I definitely I felt like the second half was the obscenity into full comedy of errors.
Yeah.
We're just like every second something is going wrong and they all just start like accidentally dying.
It actually almost becomes Dockeringdale versus people.
We're like the lady, she's not doing anything and people just keep dying around her.
(21:00):
And she didn't even realize it.
Unlike the old ladies in our second half.
And Abby and Aunt Martha who are inviting old lonely gentlemen into their home and poisoning them.
Because they're just giving them peace.
They're just making them feel peaceful.
And I mean, it is like it's almost maybe because it's almost like what would happen if that's not what they were doing.
(21:28):
And that like it's a better older lady who has a sign out saying she's got room for rent.
She's what they have in our second half of life as well.
Except that they don't actually have room for rent.
They just invite men in and then kill them.
And think they're doing a public service to those men.
Whereas she actually wants someone to rent the room.
(21:55):
Convenient for them, I guess, that the somewhere where there is like a basement that they can dig through to the office they need to get to.
Yeah, it's very convenient.
It's a very strange setup.
It's enjoyable, but very strange.
(22:19):
Again, like what I said in the beginning, there's not a lot.
Coen brothers obviously have a certain style to their directing.
And as I said, you know, Arseneke and old Lace used to be like a play.
So it is very, very singular angle.
It does really help with just the way that the action kind of flows around the set.
(22:42):
Yeah, and they have added scenes into the movie that aren't in the play.
Because obviously the play takes place in one room.
And in this one, they're outside a bit and there's the registry office and things like that.
Which are not in the stage.
But I have seen an amateur production of it and it was absolutely hilarious.
(23:05):
Because the good thing about a comedy, especially a comedy like Arseneke and old Lace,
where it's almost like they're constantly playing the cup game,
where you try to figure out which cup the thing is under and they're swapping out bodies
and different people trying to keep each other from seeing what's in there,
even though it's all kind of switched around without them knowing.
(23:26):
The great thing about that is that if anything does go wrong on the stage, it's just even more funny.
Because I can think of...
Literally, I saw an amateur production of this by college students 15 years ago probably.
And I still remember the things that went wrong in it because it was so funny.
(23:50):
So one of them was that at one point someone...
And it was always happening to Mortimer, which is even funnier because he's almost the straight man of the movie.
And it was like he tried to open the door and the whole door frame fell down.
And there was a moment where they'd had an intense conversation between Mortimer and Jonathan
and they went literally forehead to forehead.
(24:11):
And then when they pulled back the scars because they were just painted on in a stage production,
had transferred over onto Mortimer's head.
So he was trying to give a speech or whatever.
And the guy playing Jonathan was just trying not to crack up. Very funny.
But the movie and the original play are such strong comedic tone to them
(24:37):
that things going wrong on stage is actually adding to it almost.
And I think you need to have that kind of theatrical stage, physical comedy to it.
And that's why Cary Grant's performance works very well.
Also, the actresses playing the two aunts and the actor playing Teddy were all from the Broadway production.
(25:05):
And the running joke that was written into the movie is about Jonathan looking like Frankenstein
without them ever using the word Frankenstein is that Boris Karloff originated the role on Broadway.
And really wanted to be in the movie, but the Broadway play was still running and they wouldn't release him.
(25:27):
So they literally wouldn't let Boris Karloff do it.
But they did let the aunts and Teddy go, I guess, because they were less big names.
But on stage, it was billed as Boris Karloff top billing.
Like his name was the name above it.
Whereas obviously the film production, it's Cary Grant as Mortimer that's the top billing.
(25:48):
But that's why there's so many jokes.
And they did put makeup on the guy playing Jonathan to make him look a little bit more like Boris Karloff anyway.
But there's so many jokes about him looking like the guy in that scary movie that's just come out or directly saying Boris Karloff.
And they had to get Boris Karloff's okay to use his likeness and his name.
(26:12):
Otherwise it was going to be an awkward legal situation.
He was like, no, absolutely go for it.
I think he was just disappointed that he couldn't be in it.
But it is so funny that they just like jokingly reference their own stage show.
Yeah.
No, it's definitely like a very enjoyable movie to watch even now.
(26:38):
Absolutely.
And to know that there's so much history behind it because of the era that was released and things like that.
I don't know where else to go. Do you want to get into trivia?
Straight into trivia? Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of trivia about arsenic nonlays.
I don't have much about Lady Killers.
I think, yeah, I literally only took down one bit of trivia about Lady Killers, which was the university she keeps mentioning.
(27:03):
So she keeps talking about donating her money to Bob Jones University and says it's a good Bible college.
She donates to it every month or whatever.
And then at the end of the film, the police don't believe her that she has the money.
So they tell her she can keep it. And she's like, oh, I'll donate it to this.
That university banned black students until the 1970s. Jesus.
And then wouldn't allow interracial dating on campus until the 2000s.
(27:29):
So I guess that's what she means by it's a good Bible college.
But like as a black lady, I don't know why she would support it.
Arsenic and nonlays, I have a bunch of stuff.
So apparently the Brewster House at the time of production was the largest set ever built at Warner Brothers Studio.
(27:50):
They made the entire house room. It was a complete house room by room.
Every detail was put in.
And they had they actually did shoot scenes in different rooms, including the grandfather study, the house bedrooms, the cellar.
But none of it was included in the final cut of the film. Right.
(28:11):
Already talked about Boris Karloff.
So the the concept for the stage play came from an actual woman, Amy Archer Gilligan, who is known as America's most prolific female serial killer.
She was charged with the poisoning deaths of two husbands, and she also allegedly was responsible for the deaths of up to 66 elderly inmates at her nursing home.
(28:39):
Jesus. Using arsenic.
Absolutely terrifying. This woman kills almost 70 people using this method.
Frank Capra, who directed this, was one of the reasons that he was interested in being the director on board for this film was that he related to Mortimer,
(29:06):
because as a child, he did have an older brother who abused him. And that brother did grow up to become a criminal.
Of course. So he so he felt I looked him up. I think he had like eight siblings or something.
So he was he was in a large family. So I don't know which one of them it was, but that's something that he has said.
(29:28):
He also had to pay twenty five thousand dollars apiece to the Broadway play producers for loaning the actors who did get to do both.
But they wouldn't let him have Boris Karloff.
So this is something is what I said, we'd circle back to.
(29:50):
So this was filmed. They started filming in October 1941. Right. Right.
And you already said the film came out in 1944. It was supposed to be a four week shoot and it turned into an eight week shoot.
So finishing in December 1941 and then when they had less than a week to go before the filming was going to end,
(30:19):
Frank Capra quit to enlist in the Army Signal Corps as a major because Pearl Harbor was bombed. Right.
And a lot of other Hollywood directors, cast and crew followed suit and also enlisted.
So he did get an extension of his order to report for active duty until mid January.
(30:42):
So he did actually go back and do the post production and get it ready.
The reason it wasn't released in 1944 was not actually because of the war.
It was because of the contract they had with the Broadway production,
which said that they couldn't release the film until the Broadway production finished its run and it didn't finish until 1944.
(31:03):
But yeah, he went and he was a major in World War II and he made a whole series of documentaries called Why We Fight.
I mean, they kept stressing when I read about this that it was not propaganda, but it sounds like propaganda.
(31:26):
And it was like explaining to young soldiers and potential recruits like why, what the reasons for enlisting are and what we're fighting for and things like that.
But apparently they're like really informational documentaries about the war and what it was like at that time.
So it's historically really interesting documents.
(31:49):
And that was kind of the main thing they put him in because he was in his 40s, I think, at that point when you know, and he had fought in World War I.
But he also was not.
So he he's born in Italy and emigrated to the States as a child.
So I think he just feels felt very patriotic towards the country that he chose that him and his family chose to live in.
(32:13):
And that's why he wanted to go and fight.
But it meant that he didn't he didn't go back to directing until he did.
It's a Wonderful Life, which we have 1946, which we've already talked about.
But it meant that there should have been a gap of like five years, except that then this actually came out in 44 instead.
(32:36):
I did look into Cary Grant, whether he was one of the people who enlisted.
He was not because at this point he was not even a U.S. citizen.
He became a U.S. citizen between when this film was filmed and when it was released, as did the guy who played Jonathan in it because he was Canadian.
Cary Grant is British.
Yeah, so they both in the in the couple of years between when this was filmed and when it was actually released, both of those became U.S. citizens, which is funny.
(33:08):
Cary Grant. So there's lots of different reports on how much money Cary Grant was paid for this role.
But the general consensus is about one hundred and sixty five thousand dollars, of which he kept maybe sixty to sixty five thousand of it.
And he donated the rest of it to American Red Cross, British War Relief and the USO.
(33:30):
I'm not sure what that is, but like it was all kind of war relief charities.
So he donated about one hundred thousand dollars of his salary to that.
And then the only thing I had on other thing on here I had was that there was a gag in the original Broadway production that they didn't reproduce for the film, which I thought was very funny to read about,
which is that at the end of the stage play, when the cast come in and do their like bows,
(33:58):
the cellar door would open and 13 random men would walk in who had never been like never actually been shown on, you know, never been in the play like because you don't actually see any of them die.
But like just 13 guys would just walk in and take a bow to represent the 13 bodies in the cellar, which I thought was funny as well.
(34:20):
Yeah, that's about it. I didn't look at budget and box office because obviously they're so far apart.
It's kind of irrelevant. Yeah, a little bit pointless.
Is there anything else you want to talk about in them? Because this is going to be quite a short episode otherwise.
No, I think the connection is there. I don't think, you know, we're not scene for scene, character for character.
So it's very hard to like nail down anything without basically going over the plot of each movie, which I don't like doing.
(34:48):
Yeah.
It would be very interesting to see what the 1955 version of The Lady Killers is like, because even reading the plot of it, like just now while you're talking, it doesn't seem like perfectly equal either.
Yeah, I think I think it will be they'll make for an interesting remake episode.
(35:09):
Yeah.
Because I almost thought like with the style of it and how Coen Brothers do their stuff, they do a lot of kind of almost period stuff that I thought it might still be set in 1955.
But then like she's referencing hip hop music that was released in the 90s. So it's either set in the 90s or early 2000s.
And it's yeah, it's definitely a modernization of something that already existed.
(35:35):
That also now is a stage play, but not until after the remake came out.
It was then adapted for stage and has been on Broadway, I believe. But it's yeah. So it did it kind of did it the other way around.
There's also a lot of physical comedy in The Lady Killers that doesn't really translate well if I tried to explain it, because when you explain the joke, it's no longer funny.
(36:01):
And I think that's like the ongoing gag of the cat escaping the.
Those weird like she's a very the the the old lady who hits the house. Mrs. Monton. Yeah, it's very proper.
But at the same time, just like literally beats the shit out of Marlon Waynes character.
(36:26):
Wayne is Wayne. Yeah. And it's hard because he know, you know, you know, watching one of the Wayne Brothers go onto the screen is going to be some sort of I think, you know, they did make the first two, three scary movie movies.
Right. And it is very much that energy.
(36:51):
Yeah, it's hard to it's hard to say a lot without saying just, you know, scene by scene, plot by plot sort of stuff.
Tom Hanks is like you said, super weird.
I think A.K. Simmons character is very bizarre, but like it's perfectly beat like the beats of his like IBS playing up his overconfidence being, you know, foreshadowing to some horrific injury.
(37:23):
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of and I think it's I think it's typical Coen Brothers stuff, a lot of like setup and then like I'm then like a long gap before and you're like, so you there's a lot of anticipation.
Yeah, because you because they do a very good job of setting up like your expectations in your and you know what's going to happen. But then they like build out the tension of it and there's, you know, the cuts between him explaining how the how the explosives are going to work and the professor trying to, you know, get Mrs. Monson to leave before they do it.
(37:58):
So she doesn't hear it and you can add this like cutting between the two scenes and you're like, oh no, how is he going to miss this? Like something is going to go horribly wrong here.
But we don't know exactly why. But we know from the way they're setting this up.
And there's a lot of bits and pieces like that in it, I think, where they do use that kind of timing tension.
(38:20):
To get you like ready for something to happen.
And there's a little bit of that in our signal lace as well. I think, especially with the the window seat stuff. Yeah, but it's like I said, I feel like our signal lace is like doing the cup trick but with bodies where, you know, he knows that there's a body in the window seat and this is like, I just want to talk about this one of my favorite moments in the whole thing which is which could be used as a reaction gift to anything.
(38:49):
Because he knows the body in the window seat but Teddy has moved it without him knowing and then in the meantime, Jonathan's put a different body in the window seat and then it's when him and Jonathan both run to sit on the window seat.
And then he kind of is like, you know, and no word said but like the moment of him like looking at me like, why is Jonathan stopping people from looking at the body and that is like, you know, the facial expression and the way his whole body language changes and then he gets up and then he's like,
(39:16):
yes, Jonathan, let's look in the window.
You know, just like you can see every cog turning in his brain like you know exactly what he's thinking about a single line of dialogue or anyone, anyone else even like moving.
Like, it's just like fantastic comedy but it is very much this like setting up the timing and the tension of like, hold on a second.
(39:42):
I think my favorite moment for him, the acting part for him is when he sort of just gives up.
And he goes on the stage and has a cigarette.
And then he's like, shit, I gotta make a phone call. And his brother is like holding off against three police officers. Yeah.
(40:03):
And he just like asks them to move the phone higher so he can dial a number. And his brother's like, oh, okay, like holds it higher. Just that whole sequence of just it very, it's like very pre Monty Python, because Monty Python is a flying circus.
They had this like ongoing gag of like now completely unrelated. Yeah, now for something completely different. Yeah.
(40:26):
And just like this just bridging over between two scenes that are completely unrelated to each other. Yeah. But you're just following the one character.
And I think like the best sequence of that is when the whole restaurant scene ends in the meaning of life.
And they just follow Eric Idle down the street until this random house. You're like, I was born there. Like, you're like, what the fuck is happening?
(40:52):
Well, the fish. But it is very much like this moment of him just being like, you know, I've been bound to a chair. My brother's here to murder everybody.
Like, just. And also him thinking this is inevitable. My whole family is insane. I'm also going to. This is going to happen to me.
And he's just kind of giving up and resigning himself to the fact that like this is, you know, this is my future.
(41:17):
I do. There's also a moment. I mean, we're just talking about our favorite like Cary Grant moments, but there's a moment where like he because he picks up the actress playing Elaine so easily.
And there's a moment where he picks her up and she's like, you keep throwing me out.
He's like, no, I'm not throwing you out. Then he literally throws her out the door and is like, go home.
Wait a second. You couldn't have done that more literally.
(41:43):
Yeah, I think. Yeah, I think both movies have have like I do think I mean, I'm biased because I love the movie, but I do think Article Ice does it better.
But they both have. But I love Coen Brothers as well. They both have these like setups of like where you know what's either you know exactly what's happening.
Like you do in Arts and Ola's or you have like a general idea of what's being set up.
(42:05):
And there's just the you're just waiting for the bomb to go off metaphorically and in some cases literally.
You're just waiting like you're you're waiting for everything.
You know, the last of the dominoes to fall or whatever.
So I think in that aspect, the comedy style is it can be quite similar in these movies.
(42:26):
What are your thoughts on like comparing characters just of Aunt Martha and Aunt Abby with Mrs. Monson?
Because it's the only real character comparison we can do because the rest are there's no like direct character for character otherwise.
Miss Monson isn't believed by anybody that lives in the town.
(42:47):
She is very much focused on her late husband and going to church.
Like it's clear in the movie that she's just crazy and annoying person to the point where they're like the sheriff's literally asleep because there is no crime in their town.
Yeah. Not helped by the fact that when she tries to introduce the professor to the sheriff, he's hiding under the bed.
(43:16):
And to the sheriff it looks like there's no one there. She's literally lost her mind.
It's she they're very like the aunties and ask the canola blaze very sweet.
But serial killers. Yeah.
She on the other hand is very sweet, but also extremely physically violent.
(43:41):
So it isn't funny. It is that kind of funny, but it is very much like a I don't know, but just the error, the you know, that that southern attitude.
Being able to like smack around a man and like it being funny, but it is funny, but it's not funny.
(44:03):
You know what I mean? It's not.
It's not. I mean, it's it's not great that there's physical violence, but it's not like a domestic violence kind of thing.
It's more like a corporal punishment. Like she's treating him like she's his mother or grandmother.
And you see like a kind of a flashback moment from him that that is how his actual mother was.
(44:26):
So there's like I think it's partly there to make that connection that like he's the you know, the one black guy on the team.
And he sees her as being almost like a maternal figure. Yeah.
Yeah, that's that's kind of all I have to say.
They're a lot more like quippy and quippy and I don't know.
(44:56):
I think that the the physical comedy from Asnick and all Laces just like a higher standard. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, I mean, Cary Grant was originally a Vaudeville actor as well.
And I think probably some of the other cast was I mean, a lot of a lot of actors from that era would have started off in Vaudeville or in silent era cinema and things like that.
(45:17):
Where there is a lot more physical comedy or just general stage acting where you didn't need to be, you know, have a much larger physical presence.
I will say I think both Ms. Munson and the Brewster sisters have like are on a different plane of existence to everyone else.
(45:42):
Yeah. Like they don't have an accurate awareness of reality.
I think is something that's happening in both movies that like the Brewster sisters think it's totally normal and acceptable that they're killing these men.
And, you know, Ms. Munson talks about her husband like he's there and, you know, her husband was annoyed by the hip hop music, the hippity hop music.
(46:07):
But he's a painting.
And, you know, and the fact that when she finds out that they've stolen one point six million dollars, she's like, you need to give that money back and come to church with me.
It's like, OK, that's not a normal reaction to finding out that you've had criminals stealing that amount of money like from your basement.
(46:32):
Yeah. So it's a weird. Yeah. I think both. I mean, to some extent, both movies rely on these women not having a clear sense of reality.
Yeah. Because if either if any of them were grounded in reality, these scenarios wouldn't play out the way they did.
Correct. It's also interesting because like that whole tactic of tunneling into a bank vault has happened multiple times in history.
(46:59):
Yeah. So it's not like an unfeasible like crime to commit.
I mean, not to be specific, but we know we both know of places where there are measures against that kind of thing happening.
Very specific measures against that. We won't go into detail about what the measures are or where they are.
(47:20):
So we're not giving any of them any ideas.
But yeah, it's a common enough thing that there are specific security measures that you can take against that particular thing happening.
It's funny because it happens.
It does. If you want to talk to us or, you know, find out more, you can find our website.
(47:43):
It takes two dot co dot nz. We have a discord. It will be in the show notes.
Thank you for listening.
We'll catch you next time. Were you waiting for me to say it? Yeah. OK. Goodbye. Bye.
Music
(00:19):
Hi everyone, I'm Lisa.
And I'm Nick.
And you're listening to It Takes Two, the podcast where two people take two movies with the same plot or premise and watch and discuss them.
Still Halloween, I believe.
Oh, it's November when this is coming out.
Early November.
Very early. You're still in the spirit.
These seem like Halloween movies to you today.
(00:40):
Little bit.
Well, one of them is literally set on Halloween.
Fair, fair.
Today in this episode, we are covering 2004's The Lady Killers, directed by the Coen Brothers, and an absolute classic of black and white cinema, Arseneke and Old Place from 1944.
(01:01):
I love Arseneke and Old Place.
Legitimately. I was thinking about it when we were watching it. I think it might literally be my favorite classic film.
I don't know if people counted it as a classic film.
And this is not the only one I've seen. I've seen a lot of old movies. I'm a big fan of Buster Keaton in particular.
So I've seen a lot of silent era cinema. I did essays on post-war British cinema. There's a lot of good movies back then, but Arseneke and Old Place is definitely probably top spot for me, I think.
(01:36):
See, this sort of falls into the same category. I was thinking like another movie we've watched. I think it was the Friends group, wasn't it? The movie crew? What's Up, Doc?
Oh, What's Up, Doc is fun.
And then I was thinking about Duck Soup as well. Good classic movies.
(01:57):
Anyway, let's jump into these movies.
Oh yeah, so the connection between these. I feel like I haven't done this for the last couple of episodes.
I don't think it's as necessary.
Yeah, but it's nice to have a summary at the beginning of, hey, this is why we chose these two.
Because Ladykillers is actually a remix. We might end up doing it with the original Ladykillers in the future.
(02:20):
But essentially, the linked plot between these is that there is some illegal shit happening in the basement of an old lady's house.
And people don't believe the old ladies when they talk about the illegal shit that's going on. And lots of dead people are involved.
(02:44):
I will let you know the audience, not Lisa, because Lisa already knows. If you haven't seen Arseneck and Old Lace, I highly recommend watching the movie.
Even if you have to turn this podcast episode off. It's an experience, especially in this era of film that sort of doesn't happen anymore.
(03:07):
Because it was a Broadway show, so it was designed to be a stage play. And it is very obvious from the framing, the set design.
Everything about it screams like one angle camera. And the physical comedy of it all is so amazing.
(03:29):
Can I tell you, I'm going to jump straight into some trivia. Not like big trivia, but Cary Grant fucking hates this movie.
Really? He thinks it's like the worst performance he'd ever done.
Because he thinks he went way over the top on it. And it was like due to the director pushing him.
And they were supposed to do reshoots, but then they all enlisted in the army and left.
(03:51):
Which we can circle back to that part later. So they never did the reshoots.
And his hand up over the top performance is what got kept in it. And it's his least favorite of all his performances.
But there's so many. We've seen it together multiple times. I've seen it way more than that before we were in a relationship.
Legitimately one of my favorite movies of all time. And there's so many moments in this movie where Cary Grant has a look on his face that I crack up.
(04:21):
Just his whole facial expression, his physicality, the way he reacts to things.
And there's moments where he is totally silent and just acting with his eyes or with his body language.
And to me I think it's my favorite performance of his. I mean I probably haven't seen that many Cary Grant movies.
But I just think it's absolutely spectacular. Up there is probably one of the top comedic acting performances of all time.
(04:52):
For me. For those who haven't seen it, there's a GIF and it reminds me very much of his performance in this.
There's a Japanese game show where these people are stuck in a room and they have to find what things are made out of chocolate.
Is that where he bites the door handle? He bites the door handle and his face just completely changes from confusion to success.
(05:16):
And it is so much in certain scenes in this movie. I think you could make a GIF out of literally every shot of Cary Grant on screen in this movie.
And it would make a perfect reaction GIF to anything. It's genuinely spectacular. It's like a master class in physical acting for me.
And it's so funny to me that he hated it. He thought it was his worst ever performance. Maybe he just needed to see it from a modern lens.
(05:47):
We needed Cary Grant to watch that movie in the 2020s and go holy shit that was peak comedy. Genuinely spectacular.
On the flip side of that, I feel like Tom Hanks' performance was a bit sloppy.
Tom Hanks in Lady Killers is bizarre, but it's also like the least Tom Hanks I've seen him.
(06:14):
Yeah, I would agree.
Which is a good thing, I think. I think he needs to not just be the same person everything.
I hope that he enjoyed it. I didn't find anything out about how much Tom Hanks liked or didn't like his performance.
But I feel like it would have been fun to do something totally different to every other Tom Hanks performance.
(06:36):
So I'm going to jump to premise just for the audience. So massive spoilers. So if you haven't seen Ars Nick and Old Blaze, I recommend stopping now.
Okay. So Ars Nick and Old Blaze starts on Halloween and the main character is a famous writer who hates relationships and is very anti-relationships.
(07:04):
And he also reviews plays.
Yeah, he's a theatre critic, but he also is like he's written books against marriage.
Yeah. So he's madly in love with his next door neighbor and they're literally at the office, registry office to get a marriage license.
So he's head over heels. He goes back to where he's living, which is with his aunts.
(07:32):
Well, he's not living there.
He's not living there?
No, because the aunts are meeting with her dad, who's the pastor, and saying he used to only visit us once a month.
And now that they're together, he's here six days a week visiting.
So I think it's where he grew up in that home, but he's living elsewhere and being a theatre critic in New York.
(07:54):
Yeah, because I sit in Brooklyn.
And then you, yeah, he so his aunts, again, massive spoiler, are serial killers and they poison people and bury them in the basement.
The way they're getting away with this is his cousin.
(08:16):
Brother.
Teddy's his brother.
Teddy's his brother.
Teddy thinks he's Theodore Roosevelt.
Yeah.
And is Theodore Roosevelt the entire time.
And he thinks he's he thinks he's digging the Panama Canal in the basement.
I did have a moment, by the way, watching this, because we've been talking about Bubba Hoetep on and off.
(08:39):
And I keep saying, like, there is no movie that we can compare to Bubba Hoetep, because what other movie has like a black guy in a wheelchair who thinks he's JFK?
And then I was like, well, this guy thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt.
But I mean, that's where the similarities are.
But I just just thought I'd bring that up.
So, yes, it's this this realization of him trying to get his brother committed.
(09:00):
His other brother, who is also a murderer with like massive surgical scars on his face because his sidekick is performing plastic surgery on him basically monthly as he's sitting around thinking about his brother and killing people.
And just shenanigans ensue because he's trying to get his brother committed to a mental institution.
(09:28):
Teddy. Teddy. His brother is there to murder everybody.
Jonathan, the other brother.
Yeah. His aunts are insane.
The police keep rocking up.
He's also like really abusive to his new newly wedded wife.
I think.
Because he's so like focused on like his brother committed and all the dead bodies that are in the house.
(09:51):
I think it's just that like he has literally like his mind has just like split with this discovery because he discovers this all starts to unfold because he discovers a body in the window seat at the aunts house.
And he assumes that his brother Teddy, who he thinks he's here to Roosevelt, has killed someone.
And then it finds out that his aunts did it.
(10:12):
And he's like, what? And this is the day that he was eloping and he's got the cab outside ready to go on his honeymoon.
And it's just like his brain just shuts off.
So we can see from how they are before then that like he's not he hasn't been abusive towards her.
That's not like dynamic of the relationship.
(10:33):
He just like doesn't want her to find out about this.
And then also is like so focused on like how do I fix this problem?
And you can kind of tell that that's his that has been his role in the family the whole time,
even though his aunts have been the people who've like raised him and his brother and have been, you know, like caretakers.
(10:54):
You can tell that he's the one responsible person in the family and he's the one looking after his aunts and you know, making sure that his brother is OK and etc.
It's also very interesting because this doesn't come up until like Act Three. Again, spoilers.
He's not actually a Brewster. Yes.
(11:15):
He's like adopted into the family because he's the illegitimate son of a seabot captain.
So his his mother arrived to work as a cook for them pregnant, already pregnant with him. And then.
His the person he thought was his dad growing up, who is a Brewster, married her to get her out of that situation.
(11:41):
And her I think her the thought his actual biological father is and also a cook, but on a on a ship.
Yeah. And that was the reason he was also hesitant to get married, because he realized his insanity runs in his family.
Yeah. And she was just like, no, you're the most normal one.
Like, it's not until that realization of, hey, I'm actually adopted. I'm not completely insane.
(12:07):
Yeah. Like the rest of my family, I can like be happy.
At that part at the end of the movie already, the line that he shouts out the window where he's like, I'm not a Brewster. I'm the son of a she cook.
Yeah. He was a line originally was I'm not a Brewster. I'm a bastard.
And the censorship office would not let them.
(12:30):
Moving on to the movie, we've movie with this movie, The Lady Killers.
The Lady Killers. It's also yeah, it's also a very weird ensemble cast.
You've got Tom Hicks playing a southern gentleman who's also like pretending, pretending maybe to be like some sort of PhD professor, a guy who's on hiatus.
(12:53):
And basically the only evidence that we've got throughout the entire movie is he's the brains of this criminal organization.
He literally just like decided he wanted to do it and put an ad out in the newspaper and got like a weird hodgepodge.
All I was going to say is the only thing he can do is quote Edgar Allan Poe.
(13:14):
Yeah, he does quote Edgar Allan Poe and then ironically, major spoilers, ironically gets killed by a raven.
Yeah. Yeah. He's got like some henchmen, which like your boy, your boy, your favorite boy.
J.K. Simmons. J.K. Simmons plays a very bizarre character named Mr. Pancakes.
(13:37):
Yes. I don't know.
Garth Pancakes. Garth Pancakes, I think is his name.
Yeah, Marlon Waynes and he's played Gawain.
Yeah, who's playing like the inside man who's working at this casino.
Yeah. And he rents a room, pretends to be a gospel band, but it's like Renaissance music.
(14:00):
It's not gospel. They're just supposed to allegedly playing like all Renaissance instruments and stuff like weird, weird ass instruments.
Yeah. And then what he plays is like a string quartet. So it doesn't even make any sense.
Yeah. And so they're hiding in the basement covering up the fact they're digging to the offices where the boat is a boat casino.
(14:23):
Yeah. Yeah. Because they have a they talk about how in Mississippi you can't have a casino on land.
Yeah. So the casino is on a boat. Yes.
And then the money is brought into this vault in this office.
And they just like tunnel in and get into weird shenanigans the entire way through.
Yeah. Yeah. And then it becomes a real comedy of errors toward the end.
(14:45):
Yes. When and everything starts to go wrong.
When do you want to jump into that?
I don't know. How do you feel these compared to each other? Do you think that the plots are similar enough for them to make sense on this podcast together?
Because this is one that I hadn't seen in Lady Colors and I had seen this come up as like suggestion movies that are similar.
(15:11):
And I love arsenic and all that. So I jumped on the chance to be like, yeah, let's watch something with arsenic and all that.
It's definitely an interesting there is a bit of a stretch realistically.
Crime is happening in the basement and it doesn't revolve around digging.
And there are bodies and it is an old lady's house. Yeah.
And there is like disposal of bodies without people seeing what they're doing and stuff like that.
(15:35):
Yeah. But it is very much like an ensemble.
It's not really a heist movie because there's no like crew parts.
I did worry at the beginning of it when they do it because they do like an ensemble intro like it's Rat Race or something.
And then they do and then it's setting up this heist, a casino heist.
And I was like, this is more like a shitty Ocean's Eleven than Arsenal Lace.
(16:02):
Like the only thing is going for that is like in an old lady's house.
I did hope that she was going to it was going to turn out she was killing people.
I thought that would be funny. Yeah.
Ironically, it's called The Lady Killers and No Ladies Get Killed.
Yeah, it is very interesting.
That was sort of like the takeaway I took from it as well.
(16:23):
It's like no ladies were harmed in the filming of this movie called The Lady Killers.
I mean, that's like, oh, I was going to absolutely spoil another movie where the title is.
Oh, I can. Here we go.
Oh, no, because that one is true. I was going to say Rosencrested Guns are Dead.
But there are movies out there where the title is leading you to expect something to happen that doesn't actually happen in it.
(16:45):
I'm not going to name the movie.
There's a movie that you got me to watch that you have on your shelf out there.
We can talk about it after.
But it put me even saying the title of the movie after saying that would be a spoiler.
So John dies at the end.
God damn it. I was not saying it.
Yes. Yes.
Spoiler for John dies at the end. John doesn't die at the end.
(17:10):
So I understand the concept of calling it The Lady Killers to set up us to expect that this lady is going to get killed.
And then she never does.
They do try.
They certainly do try.
That's the whole kind of second act is that she finds out that they've committed this, that they've done this heist.
(17:31):
It's still one point six million dollars and it's in her basement and she's just like, no, you've got two choices.
You can like surrender.
Return the money and come to church with me or go to jail for the rest of your life.
Yeah.
Can we talk about the part that made you physically uncomfortable?
The guy eating a cigarette. Yeah.
(17:53):
It's horrible. I don't know.
It's like it happens.
I mean, he gets his comeuppance because he does it like three or four times in the movie because she says no smoking in the house.
So every time she's coming in, he just feels like I feel sick talking about it.
He just like puts the cigarette in his mouth.
He just like sucks it into his. I can't talk about it.
I genuinely I'm picturing it and it's making me gag.
(18:17):
Oh, he's got like a cigarette hooked like in his front teeth and it like flips into the back of his mouth.
Why do you want to talk about that?
Because it's making you feel ill and that's fun to me because I'm mean to you sometimes.
Horrible.
People with love.
Yeah, spoiler alert, the guy chokes on a cigarette and falls on the stairs.
(18:38):
No, that was and then he tries to he drinks the water next to her bedside table and it's got false teeth in it.
And then he falls down the stairs and dies.
Serves him right for making me feel sick by putting the cigarette inside his mouth.
I can't say it. It's awful. I'm just thinking about it.
(18:59):
That has no plot relevance. It's just upsetting.
Yeah, J.K. Simmons characters very weird.
All the characters are very weird.
Yeah, the whole like IBS thing coming through and act toe the fact that he's like works in commercials and his partner works with explosives.
(19:27):
And he met her at an IBS singles conference.
Yeah. Spoilers, obviously.
Honestly, actually, I think we really should do this as a remix episode at some point because I can't imagine any of that is in the original.
And I would love to know what the original version is.
(19:50):
Because there's no way the J.K. Simmons character, if he exists, is anything like any of it is the same as what we've gotten this one.
Yeah, what a bizarre character.
His entire introduction is also super bizarre because he like suffocates an English bulldog.
Which is very upsetting.
And Bruce Campbell is there as like the Humane Society rep.
(20:13):
Yeah.
Just bunzies. Just like hanging out.
Yeah.
No lines.
It's a very bizarre sequence.
Yeah. And yeah, just I don't know. It's a very weird movie because like it does feel just like a constant comedy of errors.
(20:36):
Yeah, I definitely I felt like the second half was the obscenity into full comedy of errors.
Yeah.
We're just like every second something is going wrong and they all just start like accidentally dying.
It actually almost becomes Dockeringdale versus people.
We're like the lady, she's not doing anything and people just keep dying around her.
(21:00):
And she didn't even realize it.
Unlike the old ladies in our second half.
And Abby and Aunt Martha who are inviting old lonely gentlemen into their home and poisoning them.
Because they're just giving them peace.
They're just making them feel peaceful.
And I mean, it is like it's almost maybe because it's almost like what would happen if that's not what they were doing.
(21:28):
And that like it's a better older lady who has a sign out saying she's got room for rent.
She's what they have in our second half of life as well.
Except that they don't actually have room for rent.
They just invite men in and then kill them.
And think they're doing a public service to those men.
Whereas she actually wants someone to rent the room.
(21:55):
Convenient for them, I guess, that the somewhere where there is like a basement that they can dig through to the office they need to get to.
Yeah, it's very convenient.
It's a very strange setup.
It's enjoyable, but very strange.
(22:19):
Again, like what I said in the beginning, there's not a lot.
Coen brothers obviously have a certain style to their directing.
And as I said, you know, Arseneke and old Lace used to be like a play.
So it is very, very singular angle.
It does really help with just the way that the action kind of flows around the set.
(22:42):
Yeah, and they have added scenes into the movie that aren't in the play.
Because obviously the play takes place in one room.
And in this one, they're outside a bit and there's the registry office and things like that.
Which are not in the stage.
But I have seen an amateur production of it and it was absolutely hilarious.
(23:05):
Because the good thing about a comedy, especially a comedy like Arseneke and old Lace,
where it's almost like they're constantly playing the cup game,
where you try to figure out which cup the thing is under and they're swapping out bodies
and different people trying to keep each other from seeing what's in there,
even though it's all kind of switched around without them knowing.
(23:26):
The great thing about that is that if anything does go wrong on the stage, it's just even more funny.
Because I can think of...
Literally, I saw an amateur production of this by college students 15 years ago probably.
And I still remember the things that went wrong in it because it was so funny.
(23:50):
So one of them was that at one point someone...
And it was always happening to Mortimer, which is even funnier because he's almost the straight man of the movie.
And it was like he tried to open the door and the whole door frame fell down.
And there was a moment where they'd had an intense conversation between Mortimer and Jonathan
and they went literally forehead to forehead.
(24:11):
And then when they pulled back the scars because they were just painted on in a stage production,
had transferred over onto Mortimer's head.
So he was trying to give a speech or whatever.
And the guy playing Jonathan was just trying not to crack up. Very funny.
But the movie and the original play are such strong comedic tone to them
(24:37):
that things going wrong on stage is actually adding to it almost.
And I think you need to have that kind of theatrical stage, physical comedy to it.
And that's why Cary Grant's performance works very well.
Also, the actresses playing the two aunts and the actor playing Teddy were all from the Broadway production.
(25:05):
And the running joke that was written into the movie is about Jonathan looking like Frankenstein
without them ever using the word Frankenstein is that Boris Karloff originated the role on Broadway.
And really wanted to be in the movie, but the Broadway play was still running and they wouldn't release him.
(25:27):
So they literally wouldn't let Boris Karloff do it.
But they did let the aunts and Teddy go, I guess, because they were less big names.
But on stage, it was billed as Boris Karloff top billing.
Like his name was the name above it.
Whereas obviously the film production, it's Cary Grant as Mortimer that's the top billing.
(25:48):
But that's why there's so many jokes.
And they did put makeup on the guy playing Jonathan to make him look a little bit more like Boris Karloff anyway.
But there's so many jokes about him looking like the guy in that scary movie that's just come out or directly saying Boris Karloff.
And they had to get Boris Karloff's okay to use his likeness and his name.
(26:12):
Otherwise it was going to be an awkward legal situation.
He was like, no, absolutely go for it.
I think he was just disappointed that he couldn't be in it.
But it is so funny that they just like jokingly reference their own stage show.
Yeah.
No, it's definitely like a very enjoyable movie to watch even now.
(26:38):
Absolutely.
And to know that there's so much history behind it because of the era that was released and things like that.
I don't know where else to go. Do you want to get into trivia?
Straight into trivia? Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of trivia about arsenic nonlays.
I don't have much about Lady Killers.
I think, yeah, I literally only took down one bit of trivia about Lady Killers, which was the university she keeps mentioning.
(27:03):
So she keeps talking about donating her money to Bob Jones University and says it's a good Bible college.
She donates to it every month or whatever.
And then at the end of the film, the police don't believe her that she has the money.
So they tell her she can keep it. And she's like, oh, I'll donate it to this.
That university banned black students until the 1970s. Jesus.
And then wouldn't allow interracial dating on campus until the 2000s.
(27:29):
So I guess that's what she means by it's a good Bible college.
But like as a black lady, I don't know why she would support it.
Arsenic and nonlays, I have a bunch of stuff.
So apparently the Brewster House at the time of production was the largest set ever built at Warner Brothers Studio.
(27:50):
They made the entire house room. It was a complete house room by room.
Every detail was put in.
And they had they actually did shoot scenes in different rooms, including the grandfather study, the house bedrooms, the cellar.
But none of it was included in the final cut of the film. Right.
(28:11):
Already talked about Boris Karloff.
So the the concept for the stage play came from an actual woman, Amy Archer Gilligan, who is known as America's most prolific female serial killer.
She was charged with the poisoning deaths of two husbands, and she also allegedly was responsible for the deaths of up to 66 elderly inmates at her nursing home.
(28:39):
Jesus. Using arsenic.
Absolutely terrifying. This woman kills almost 70 people using this method.
Frank Capra, who directed this, was one of the reasons that he was interested in being the director on board for this film was that he related to Mortimer,
(29:06):
because as a child, he did have an older brother who abused him. And that brother did grow up to become a criminal.
Of course. So he so he felt I looked him up. I think he had like eight siblings or something.
So he was he was in a large family. So I don't know which one of them it was, but that's something that he has said.
(29:28):
He also had to pay twenty five thousand dollars apiece to the Broadway play producers for loaning the actors who did get to do both.
But they wouldn't let him have Boris Karloff.
So this is something is what I said, we'd circle back to.
(29:50):
So this was filmed. They started filming in October 1941. Right. Right.
And you already said the film came out in 1944. It was supposed to be a four week shoot and it turned into an eight week shoot.
So finishing in December 1941 and then when they had less than a week to go before the filming was going to end,
(30:19):
Frank Capra quit to enlist in the Army Signal Corps as a major because Pearl Harbor was bombed. Right.
And a lot of other Hollywood directors, cast and crew followed suit and also enlisted.
So he did get an extension of his order to report for active duty until mid January.
(30:42):
So he did actually go back and do the post production and get it ready.
The reason it wasn't released in 1944 was not actually because of the war.
It was because of the contract they had with the Broadway production,
which said that they couldn't release the film until the Broadway production finished its run and it didn't finish until 1944.
(31:03):
But yeah, he went and he was a major in World War II and he made a whole series of documentaries called Why We Fight.
I mean, they kept stressing when I read about this that it was not propaganda, but it sounds like propaganda.
(31:26):
And it was like explaining to young soldiers and potential recruits like why, what the reasons for enlisting are and what we're fighting for and things like that.
But apparently they're like really informational documentaries about the war and what it was like at that time.
So it's historically really interesting documents.
(31:49):
And that was kind of the main thing they put him in because he was in his 40s, I think, at that point when you know, and he had fought in World War I.
But he also was not.
So he he's born in Italy and emigrated to the States as a child.
So I think he just feels felt very patriotic towards the country that he chose that him and his family chose to live in.
(32:13):
And that's why he wanted to go and fight.
But it meant that he didn't he didn't go back to directing until he did.
It's a Wonderful Life, which we have 1946, which we've already talked about.
But it meant that there should have been a gap of like five years, except that then this actually came out in 44 instead.
(32:36):
I did look into Cary Grant, whether he was one of the people who enlisted.
He was not because at this point he was not even a U.S. citizen.
He became a U.S. citizen between when this film was filmed and when it was released, as did the guy who played Jonathan in it because he was Canadian.
Cary Grant is British.
Yeah, so they both in the in the couple of years between when this was filmed and when it was actually released, both of those became U.S. citizens, which is funny.
(33:08):
Cary Grant. So there's lots of different reports on how much money Cary Grant was paid for this role.
But the general consensus is about one hundred and sixty five thousand dollars, of which he kept maybe sixty to sixty five thousand of it.
And he donated the rest of it to American Red Cross, British War Relief and the USO.
(33:30):
I'm not sure what that is, but like it was all kind of war relief charities.
So he donated about one hundred thousand dollars of his salary to that.
And then the only thing I had on other thing on here I had was that there was a gag in the original Broadway production that they didn't reproduce for the film, which I thought was very funny to read about,
which is that at the end of the stage play, when the cast come in and do their like bows,
(33:58):
the cellar door would open and 13 random men would walk in who had never been like never actually been shown on, you know, never been in the play like because you don't actually see any of them die.
But like just 13 guys would just walk in and take a bow to represent the 13 bodies in the cellar, which I thought was funny as well.
(34:20):
Yeah, that's about it. I didn't look at budget and box office because obviously they're so far apart.
It's kind of irrelevant. Yeah, a little bit pointless.
Is there anything else you want to talk about in them? Because this is going to be quite a short episode otherwise.
No, I think the connection is there. I don't think, you know, we're not scene for scene, character for character.
So it's very hard to like nail down anything without basically going over the plot of each movie, which I don't like doing.
(34:48):
Yeah.
It would be very interesting to see what the 1955 version of The Lady Killers is like, because even reading the plot of it, like just now while you're talking, it doesn't seem like perfectly equal either.
Yeah, I think I think it will be they'll make for an interesting remake episode.
(35:09):
Yeah.
Because I almost thought like with the style of it and how Coen Brothers do their stuff, they do a lot of kind of almost period stuff that I thought it might still be set in 1955.
But then like she's referencing hip hop music that was released in the 90s. So it's either set in the 90s or early 2000s.
And it's yeah, it's definitely a modernization of something that already existed.
(35:35):
That also now is a stage play, but not until after the remake came out.
It was then adapted for stage and has been on Broadway, I believe. But it's yeah. So it did it kind of did it the other way around.
There's also a lot of physical comedy in The Lady Killers that doesn't really translate well if I tried to explain it, because when you explain the joke, it's no longer funny.
(36:01):
And I think that's like the ongoing gag of the cat escaping the.
Those weird like she's a very the the the old lady who hits the house. Mrs. Monton. Yeah, it's very proper.
But at the same time, just like literally beats the shit out of Marlon Waynes character.
(36:26):
Wayne is Wayne. Yeah. And it's hard because he know, you know, you know, watching one of the Wayne Brothers go onto the screen is going to be some sort of I think, you know, they did make the first two, three scary movie movies.
Right. And it is very much that energy.
(36:51):
Yeah, it's hard to it's hard to say a lot without saying just, you know, scene by scene, plot by plot sort of stuff.
Tom Hanks is like you said, super weird.
I think A.K. Simmons character is very bizarre, but like it's perfectly beat like the beats of his like IBS playing up his overconfidence being, you know, foreshadowing to some horrific injury.
(37:23):
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of and I think it's I think it's typical Coen Brothers stuff, a lot of like setup and then like I'm then like a long gap before and you're like, so you there's a lot of anticipation.
Yeah, because you because they do a very good job of setting up like your expectations in your and you know what's going to happen. But then they like build out the tension of it and there's, you know, the cuts between him explaining how the how the explosives are going to work and the professor trying to, you know, get Mrs. Monson to leave before they do it.
(37:58):
So she doesn't hear it and you can add this like cutting between the two scenes and you're like, oh no, how is he going to miss this? Like something is going to go horribly wrong here.
But we don't know exactly why. But we know from the way they're setting this up.
And there's a lot of bits and pieces like that in it, I think, where they do use that kind of timing tension.
(38:20):
To get you like ready for something to happen.
And there's a little bit of that in our signal lace as well. I think, especially with the the window seat stuff. Yeah, but it's like I said, I feel like our signal lace is like doing the cup trick but with bodies where, you know, he knows that there's a body in the window seat and this is like, I just want to talk about this one of my favorite moments in the whole thing which is which could be used as a reaction gift to anything.
(38:49):
Because he knows the body in the window seat but Teddy has moved it without him knowing and then in the meantime, Jonathan's put a different body in the window seat and then it's when him and Jonathan both run to sit on the window seat.
And then he kind of is like, you know, and no word said but like the moment of him like looking at me like, why is Jonathan stopping people from looking at the body and that is like, you know, the facial expression and the way his whole body language changes and then he gets up and then he's like,
(39:16):
yes, Jonathan, let's look in the window.
You know, just like you can see every cog turning in his brain like you know exactly what he's thinking about a single line of dialogue or anyone, anyone else even like moving.
Like, it's just like fantastic comedy but it is very much this like setting up the timing and the tension of like, hold on a second.
(39:42):
I think my favorite moment for him, the acting part for him is when he sort of just gives up.
And he goes on the stage and has a cigarette.
And then he's like, shit, I gotta make a phone call. And his brother is like holding off against three police officers. Yeah.
(40:03):
And he just like asks them to move the phone higher so he can dial a number. And his brother's like, oh, okay, like holds it higher. Just that whole sequence of just it very, it's like very pre Monty Python, because Monty Python is a flying circus.
They had this like ongoing gag of like now completely unrelated. Yeah, now for something completely different. Yeah.
(40:26):
And just like this just bridging over between two scenes that are completely unrelated to each other. Yeah. But you're just following the one character.
And I think like the best sequence of that is when the whole restaurant scene ends in the meaning of life.
And they just follow Eric Idle down the street until this random house. You're like, I was born there. Like, you're like, what the fuck is happening?
(40:52):
Well, the fish. But it is very much like this moment of him just being like, you know, I've been bound to a chair. My brother's here to murder everybody.
Like, just. And also him thinking this is inevitable. My whole family is insane. I'm also going to. This is going to happen to me.
And he's just kind of giving up and resigning himself to the fact that like this is, you know, this is my future.
(41:17):
I do. There's also a moment. I mean, we're just talking about our favorite like Cary Grant moments, but there's a moment where like he because he picks up the actress playing Elaine so easily.
And there's a moment where he picks her up and she's like, you keep throwing me out.
He's like, no, I'm not throwing you out. Then he literally throws her out the door and is like, go home.
Wait a second. You couldn't have done that more literally.
(41:43):
Yeah, I think. Yeah, I think both movies have have like I do think I mean, I'm biased because I love the movie, but I do think Article Ice does it better.
But they both have. But I love Coen Brothers as well. They both have these like setups of like where you know what's either you know exactly what's happening.
Like you do in Arts and Ola's or you have like a general idea of what's being set up.
(42:05):
And there's just the you're just waiting for the bomb to go off metaphorically and in some cases literally.
You're just waiting like you're you're waiting for everything.
You know, the last of the dominoes to fall or whatever.
So I think in that aspect, the comedy style is it can be quite similar in these movies.
(42:26):
What are your thoughts on like comparing characters just of Aunt Martha and Aunt Abby with Mrs. Monson?
Because it's the only real character comparison we can do because the rest are there's no like direct character for character otherwise.
Miss Monson isn't believed by anybody that lives in the town.
(42:47):
She is very much focused on her late husband and going to church.
Like it's clear in the movie that she's just crazy and annoying person to the point where they're like the sheriff's literally asleep because there is no crime in their town.
Yeah. Not helped by the fact that when she tries to introduce the professor to the sheriff, he's hiding under the bed.
(43:16):
And to the sheriff it looks like there's no one there. She's literally lost her mind.
It's she they're very like the aunties and ask the canola blaze very sweet.
But serial killers. Yeah.
She on the other hand is very sweet, but also extremely physically violent.
(43:41):
So it isn't funny. It is that kind of funny, but it is very much like a I don't know, but just the error, the you know, that that southern attitude.
Being able to like smack around a man and like it being funny, but it is funny, but it's not funny.
(44:03):
You know what I mean? It's not.
It's not. I mean, it's it's not great that there's physical violence, but it's not like a domestic violence kind of thing.
It's more like a corporal punishment. Like she's treating him like she's his mother or grandmother.
And you see like a kind of a flashback moment from him that that is how his actual mother was.
(44:26):
So there's like I think it's partly there to make that connection that like he's the you know, the one black guy on the team.
And he sees her as being almost like a maternal figure. Yeah.
Yeah, that's that's kind of all I have to say.
They're a lot more like quippy and quippy and I don't know.
(44:56):
I think that the the physical comedy from Asnick and all Laces just like a higher standard. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, I mean, Cary Grant was originally a Vaudeville actor as well.
And I think probably some of the other cast was I mean, a lot of a lot of actors from that era would have started off in Vaudeville or in silent era cinema and things like that.
(45:17):
Where there is a lot more physical comedy or just general stage acting where you didn't need to be, you know, have a much larger physical presence.
I will say I think both Ms. Munson and the Brewster sisters have like are on a different plane of existence to everyone else.
(45:42):
Yeah. Like they don't have an accurate awareness of reality.
I think is something that's happening in both movies that like the Brewster sisters think it's totally normal and acceptable that they're killing these men.
And, you know, Ms. Munson talks about her husband like he's there and, you know, her husband was annoyed by the hip hop music, the hippity hop music.
(46:07):
But he's a painting.
And, you know, and the fact that when she finds out that they've stolen one point six million dollars, she's like, you need to give that money back and come to church with me.
It's like, OK, that's not a normal reaction to finding out that you've had criminals stealing that amount of money like from your basement.
(46:32):
Yeah. So it's a weird. Yeah. I think both. I mean, to some extent, both movies rely on these women not having a clear sense of reality.
Yeah. Because if either if any of them were grounded in reality, these scenarios wouldn't play out the way they did.
Correct. It's also interesting because like that whole tactic of tunneling into a bank vault has happened multiple times in history.
(46:59):
Yeah. So it's not like an unfeasible like crime to commit.
I mean, not to be specific, but we know we both know of places where there are measures against that kind of thing happening.
Very specific measures against that. We won't go into detail about what the measures are or where they are.
(47:20):
So we're not giving any of them any ideas.
But yeah, it's a common enough thing that there are specific security measures that you can take against that particular thing happening.
It's funny because it happens.
It does. If you want to talk to us or, you know, find out more, you can find our website.
(47:43):
It takes two dot co dot nz. We have a discord. It will be in the show notes.
Thank you for listening.
We'll catch you next time. Were you waiting for me to say it? Yeah. OK. Goodbye. Bye.
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
True Crime Tonight
If you eat, sleep, and breathe true crime, TRUE CRIME TONIGHT is serving up your nightly fix. Five nights a week, KT STUDIOS & iHEART RADIO invite listeners to pull up a seat for an unfiltered look at the biggest cases making headlines, celebrity scandals, and the trials everyone is watching. With a mix of expert analysis, hot takes, and listener call-ins, TRUE CRIME TONIGHT goes beyond the headlines to uncover the twists, turns, and unanswered questions that keep us all obsessed—because, at TRUE CRIME TONIGHT, there’s a seat for everyone. Whether breaking down crime scene forensics, scrutinizing serial killers, or debating the most binge-worthy true crime docs, True Crime Tonight is the fresh, fast-paced, and slightly addictive home for true crime lovers.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com