#arsenic and old lace

20th-century-man:

Priscilla Lane, Cary Grant / publicity still for Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace(1944)

michaelcorleones:

Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.

ARSENIC AND OLD LACE
1944, dir Frank Capra

“Stereotypical images, like all aspects of culture, change and evolve over the years. Queer women in classical Hollywood films often appeared as spinster aunts or prison matrons, but by the 1970s, they were often being represented as vampires, a trope that turned same-sex love and affection into something cruel and monstrous. By the twenty-first century, a wide variety of openly queer people and queer "looks” has made it more difficult for the mass media to create new stereotypes, but traces of the old ones can still be discerned.“

-FromQueer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America by Griffin Benshoff

*Images are from Arsenic and Old Lace(1943),Caged(1950),The Vampire Lovers (1970), and Vampire Killers(2009)

Arsenic and Old Lace performed by children

(Eric Schaal. 1943)