Arsenic and Old Lace

Frank Capra was born in Sicily in 1897 and emigrated to Los Angeles as a child. He studied chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology before entering the film industry, eventually working his way from gag writing for Hal Roach and Mack Sennett to directing at Columbia Pictures in the late 1920s. Through the 1930s Capra defined a distinctive strain of American populist comedy and drama built around ordinary decency confronting corruption and cynicism, in films including "It Happened One Night" (1934), "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" (1936), "You Can't Take It with You" (1938), and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939). He won the Academy Award for Best Director three times, for "It Happened One Night," "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," and "You Can't Take It with You." During the Second World War Capra served in the Army Signal Corps, producing the "Why We Fight" documentary series. His postwar work, including "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946), was received more coolly at the time than the acclaim it later accumulated, and his career slowed considerably through the 1950s as his brand of sentimental optimism fell out of critical and commercial favor. Capra directed Cary Grant only once, late in Grant's run of manic wartime comedies, in a project markedly darker in tone than Capra's signature work.

Priscilla Lane was born Priscilla Mullican in Indianola, Iowa, in 1915, one of four sisters — Rosemary, Lola, Leota and Priscilla — who performed together as the singing Lane Sisters before Priscilla signed a contract at Warner Bros. in the late 1930s. She quickly became one of the studio's brighter ingenue leads, playing opposite James Cagney in The Roaring Twenties (1939) and starring for Alfred Hitchcock in the wartime thriller Saboteur (1942), one of the director's leaner and more overtly propagandistic pictures. Her best-remembered role came in Frank Capra's black comedy Arsenic and Old Lace, shot in 1941 but held from release until 1944 because of wartime restrictions on releasing films based on running Broadway plays. Lane played Elaine Harper, the minister's daughter who marries Grant's Mortimer Brewster on the same day he begins discovering his aunts' habit of poisoning lonely old men in the cellar; her role is largely reactive, giving Grant's increasingly frantic double-takes room to work, but it remains her most widely seen performance by far. Lane's career was comparatively brief. She retired from acting in 1948, still in her early thirties, and did not return to the screen, choosing family life over a continued career at a moment when many of her Warner Bros. contemporaries were still working. She died in 1995 in Andover, Massachusetts. Her retirement makes her filmography compact rather than sprawling, but Arsenic and Old Lace's enduring popularity as a stage and screen staple has kept her performance, and her name, in continuous circulation long after her own departure from the business.