Arsenic and Old Lace (DVD)

Frank Capra adapted a hit stage play for this marvelous screwball meeting of the madcap and the macabre. 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 (John Alexander) who thinks hes Teddy Roosevelt, a crazed criminal (Raymond Massey) whos a dead ringer for Boris Karloff, and a seriously slippery plastic surgeon (Peter Lorre) are among the outre oddballs populating Arsenic and Old Lace, a diabolical delight that only gets funnier as the body count rises.