A Capra / Burton Halloween

Happy Halloween! I have two essays to recommend—two different opportunities for Halloween movie watching.

First, Frank Capra’s Arsenic & Old Lace:

Halloween has gradually become an occasion for horror movies, even as it has emerged as part of a new kind of autumn-worship very well catered to by every aspect of our commercial society. It may, in a secularizing America, even be making a run at Christmas’s place as the national holiday. Both of these tendencies somehow come from our rejection of authority, both the authority of the past & the authority of religion over both conscience & behavior.

But it might be better to reflect on Halloween & the conflict between our love of freedom & respect for the past from a comic point-of-view, avoiding the extremes of fear & pleasure we seek from our media today. So I recommend Frank Capra’s 1944 picture Arsenic and Old Lace, a classic slapstick comedy set on Halloween, starring Cary Grant & Priscilla Lane as all-American newlyweds who find they have a remarkable past to live down before they can even talk of a honeymoon.

Arsenic and Old Lace was very successful, both commercially & critically, as well as Capra’s last movie before he went to work for the Army during the Second World War. It was adapted from a very successful Broadway play, by the Epstein twins, who won the Oscar for writing Casablanca. The movie mixes innocence & sophistication in a way that was typical of cinema at that time, but which has been lost since—itself very revealing of the changes that have led Americans to take Halloween seriously rather than comically.

Then, something modern or postmodern, Tim Burton’s Batman:

Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns might be the perfect Halloween movies. They were big successes back in 1989 & 1992, grossing together more than a billion dollars (adjusted for inflation). They are fun popcorn movies, but also weird artistic experiments that embrace the juvenile character of American pop culture while revisiting cinema history.

Batman & Burton deserve credit or blame for turning cinema toward superhero stories, which have since become the dominant film genre. But they were funnier than comic book stories have been since, better able to mix various elements of pop culture, & more at home with Hollywood glamour. To the extent that our entertainment has the character of childish playing with expensive toys, there’s a lot to be said for knowing all the aspects of the business without taking any of them too seriously.

Batman mixed New Hollywood stars like Jack Nicholson (The Joker) with the hottest pop musician of its time—Prince, who scored a multiplatinum album with the soundtrack. Cool cats like Billy Dee Williams (Harvey Dent) were placed onscreen next to old heavies like Jack Palance (the gangster Grissom). Then there’s Burton’s own favored composer Danny Elfman, whose score has proved quite influential on subsequent Batman productions. Balancing Prince’s American funk, Elfman’s Romanticism recalled the Euro-classical influence on film music.

Here also is my Halloween podcast on Capra’s last screwball comedy with Hannah Grace Long:

What are you watching for Halloween?