Every Friday during Lent, Sean will be writing about a different movie from a Catholic (or at least, Catholic-raised) director, and how their religious upbringing influenced the film in question. Each movie has at its core that most Catholic of all sentiments: heaping loads of internalized guilt. For this first Friday of Lent, he's starting off relatively light, with Frank Capra’s classic stage-to-screen adaptation, Arsenic and Old Lace. Spoilers ahead for a 70+ year old movie that's well worth watching.

Famously eligible bachelor Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) has taken his fiancée, Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane) to the city courthouse to get married in secret. He does so to protect his personal brand as the man who literally wrote the guide to being a bachelor in the city; his reputation would be marred if he were to be found out. After sneaking out of the courthouse with his new bride, Mortimer heads home to tell his Aunts Abby and Martha (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair, respectively) the happy news and then he prepares for his honeymoon to Niagara Falls.

Then he finds a body in the window seat in the main living room. His perfectly polite and proper, elderly aunts nonchalantly describe how they’ve put out a “Room for Rent” sign to invite wandering gentlemen into their home. And then they poison them.

Luckily for Aunts Abby and Martha, Teddy Brewster (John Alexander) believes himself to be Teddy Roosevelt, digging the Panama Canal in the basement, and believes his aunts’ victims to be yellow fever casualties to be buried.

It’s the perfect crime, y’see. There's no way in the world this could become an issue.