(Cast: 12M, 9F. Emily Blachman has opened her mansion to b...)
Cast: 12M, 9F. Emily Blachman has opened her mansion to boarders to ensure that her family will be housed and fed when her imaginative husband over extends himself. Already president of the trolley line, the bank and the laundry, he is always borrowing for new investments. The hilarious boarders are an old maid schoolteacher, a mysterious salesman, a widow who dresses extravagantly, an aged prospector, a man who sneaks up the back stairs to visit the teacher, an alcoholic yodeler, a widow who makes her son write poetry and a scion of an old Boston family. Both young men woo the Blachman's daughter.
Arsenic and Old Lace (Based on a play by Joseph Kesselring, Screenplay Movie Script)
(Arsenic and Old Lace is a film directed by Frank Capra ba...)
Arsenic and Old Lace is a film directed by Frank Capra based on Joseph Kesselring's play of the same name. The script adaptation was by twins Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein.
Arsenic and Old Lace has been a family Halloween tradition for years. In some ways it might be called the original horror spoof: Two sweet old ladies poison lonely old men as a "charity" and bury them in the cellar, and no sooner does their stable nephew find out about this (while preparing to leave for his honeymoon) than his long-lost homicidal brother returns with a face like Frankenstein's monster.
Cary Grant knew his way around a comedy, so it's easy to believe when his character Mortimer grows more and more frazzled throughout the night, jumping from one problem to the next so quickly that he can't even remember he's just been married that day. In his place, juggling four insane relatives (three of them killers), a handful of cops, and two dead bodies, we'd all feel the worse for wear. The pace is quick, almost frantic at times; complications and plot twists come faster than anyone in the movie can handle them. The only characters who aren't perturbed and thrown completely out of their elements by the affair are the rest of the Brewster family, who are all crazy anyway.
Philip G. Epstein was an American screenwriter most known for his screenplay for the film Casablanca (1942), which won an Academy Award. He had written it in partnership with his twin brother, Julius, and Howard Koch as an adaptation of the unproduced play, Everybody Comes to Rick's, written by Murray Bennett and Joan Alison.
Background
He was born in New York City, the son of Henry and Sara Gronenberg Epstein. His father, the proprietor of a livery stable on the Lower East Side, had emigrated from Russia late in the 1890's; his mother had come from Poland shortly after the turn of the century.
Later in life Philip Epstein added the middle initial G. to his name, after his mother's maiden name.
Education
Epstein attended public schools in New York, and after graduating from Erasmus Hall High School he studied drama briefly at the City College of New York.
In 1929 he entered Pennsylvania State College; his brother Julius had begun studies there the previous year.
Both brothers studied playwriting in college, and both participated in intercollegiate boxing.
Philip received a B. A. degree in 1932.
Career
For a short period after his graduation Philip Epstein wrote radio scripts and magazine fiction.
In 1934 he went to Hollywood to begin work as a writer for films. His brother Julius had already gone to Hollywood the preceding year as a ghostwriter for a writer under contract to a major studio. It was this same writer who brought Philip to Hollywood, also to ghostwrite scripts for him.
Philip's first script under his own name was Love on a Bet, produced by RKO-Radio in 1936. Julius J. Epstein's early, unsigned screenplays were produced by Paramount Pictures, but in 1935 he went under contract to Warner Brothers, thus beginning a relationship that was soon to be important to the careers of both twins and to the history of American film.
While still at the outset of their Hollywood work, the brothers, teaming together for the first time, wrote a serious social comedy, And Stars Remain, which the Theater Guild produced in 1936.
After the closing of their play the Epsteins pursued their Hollywood careers independently for two years. They were reunited in 1938 at Warner Brothers. The following year saw the release of their first screen collaboration, Daughters Courageous. This very popular film was inspired by, if not precisely a sequel to, Four Daughters, a Warner Brothers release of 1938 for which the script had been written by Julius J. Epstein and Lenore Coffee and in which John Garfield had made a striking screen debut.
The casts of both films included Garfield, the Lane sisters (Priscilla, Rosemary, and Lola), and Gale Page. The Epsteins also wrote Four Wives (1939) for these performers. (A fourth film, Four Mothers, was not their work. ) It was as an adaptor of materials provided by other writers that Philip Epstein, along with his brother, made his Hollywood success.
The Garfield-Lane pictures, for example, were based on a novel by Fannie Hurst. In many instances, however, the twins' work varied widely from the original or used it only as the starting point of an essentially new plot.
Among the plays that they adapted were Maxwell Anderson's Saturday's Children (1940), S. N. Behrman's No Time for Comedy (1940), James Thurber and Elliott Nugent's The Male Animal (1942), George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942), and Joseph Kesselring's Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)--all popular, well-received films. More notable than these among the Epsteins' pictures were Strawberry Blonde (1941), based on James Hagan's comedy One Sunday Afternoon, a genial evocation of the 1890's, with James Cagney and Rita Hayworth; Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), in which Cagney sang and danced as the brash and flashy George M. Cohan (in a gesture of spontaneous and inordinate generosity, they gave credit for this film to Robert Buckner and Edmund Joseph); Mr. Skeffington (1944), which required Bette Davis to pass from glamorous youth to doddering old age; and Casablanca (1943), in which Humphrey Bogart achieved immortality as the cynical expatriate saloon keeper who nonetheless maintained his thoroughly American, right-thinking values.
Perhaps no other film of World War II was destined to be so fondly remembered as Casablanca, not only for its intrigue and performances, but for its very language. For the screenplay the twins and their collaborator, Howard Koch, received an Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The last film for which Philip Epstein received a screen credit was The Last Time I Saw Paris, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Babylon Revisited. This was released posthumously by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1954.
Despite their crowded schedule in Hollywood, the twins found time to write again for the stage in the 1940's.
In 1941 their comedy Rufus and His Wife was produced at the County Theater in Suffern, New York.
In 1944 Chicken Every Sunday, based on the volume of memoirs of the same name by Rosemary Taylor, had a nine-month run in New York. Their last stage work together was That's the Ticket, a musical that opened and closed in Philadelphia in 1948.
(Cast: 12M, 9F. Emily Blachman has opened her mansion to b...)
Politics
Philip Epstein and his brother were known in Hollywood not only for their skill in developing taut scripts with crisp dialogue, but also for their conversational wit, their ability as practical jokers, and their political liberalism.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
In 1944 an anonymous writer for the Brooklyn Eagle observed of them, "Each has a bulging forehead, scant hair, deep-set eyes. They dress alike and think alike, and as they talk, they jump around a great deal, both literally and figuratively. . Their rapid-fire repartee is apt to leave a less nimble mind numb. "
Connections
In 1932 he married Lillian Targan; they had two children.