ARSENIC AND OLD LACE

Frank Capra adapted a hit stage play for this marvelous screwball meeting of the madcap and the macabre, ARSENIC AND OLD LACE. On Halloween, newly married drama critic Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant, cutting loose in a hilariously harried performance) returns home to Brooklyn, where his adorably dotty aunts (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair, who both starred in the Broadway production) greet him with love, sweetness . . . and a grisly surprise: the corpses buried in their cellar. A bugle-playing brother who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt, a crazed criminal who’s a dead ringer for Boris Karloff, and a seriously slippery plastic surgeon are among the outré oddballs populating ARSENIC AND OLD LACE, a diabolical delight that only gets funnier as the body count rises.