Arsenic and Old Lace

Director: Frank Capra

1944 / 118min / DCP

There’s more than enough lunacy to go around in Capra’s screamingly funny, pitch black screwball comedy, adapted from the Broadway phenomenon of the same name, in which theater critic Mortimer Brewster (a fabulously flustered Cary Grant) encounters mortification and more than one dead body when he takes his new bride (Priscilla Lane) to meet his family in Brooklyn. Uncle Teddy (John Alexander, who originated the role) labors under the delusion that he’s Theodore Roosevelt, but he faces stiff competition for the title of Craziest Brewster from his serial killing sisters and Mortimer’s monstrous plastic-surgery mauled brother (Raymond Massey), who show up on the scene with none other than Peter Lorre in tow.