Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), dir. Frank Capra, Warner Bros.
At this point, Lorre was now a full character actor. Granted, the character was usually a twitchy weirdo but every so often he would play something different.
The Brewster family is your typical old money family; sprawling estate, tracing their family back to the Mayflower passenger list, etc. Youngest son Mortimer (Cary Grant) is dropping by on Halloween to tell his two aunts about his impending marriage to their next-door neighbor's daughter Eliane (Priscella Lane). The whole thing comes as a shock to the elderly women, as Mortimer had long made it known that he was very much against the institution of marriage.
Speaking of institutions, Mortimer's brother Teddy (John Alexander) is still living at home. That is to say, President Theordore Roosevelt; Yup, Teddy is convinced he is the former president. He's harmless though, ignoring his habit of mistaking stairs for San Juan Hill. He busies himself burying all the victims of Yellow Fever as he builds the Panama Canal in the basement.
As Mortimer looks for some notes, he stumbles across a dead body. He naturally assumes Teddy did it, but Aunt Abby (Josephine Hull) and Aunt Martha (Jean Adair) are shocked at the notion. After all, they should know who they bumped off, right?
Yeah, seems the aunts have been in the habit of luring older men to their home and poisoning them. Easing their suffering, they claim.
That's when brother Jonathan (Raymond Massey) pops in with his personal plastic surgeon, Dr. Einstein (Lorre). Jonathan also the corpse of his latest victim with him, with the police on his trail. He's rather put out at Dr. Einstein's latest work. Instead of a matinee idol's face, Einstein drunkenly worked on him while looking at a horror movie review, giving Jonthan the image of a certain horror movie actor...
Can Mortimer contain the situation, or will he be driven as bonkers as the rest of his family?
Darn funny; Lorre steals the show as the alcoholic doc. Boris Karloff played Jonathan on the stage and I curse that he wasn't allowed to play him on film. Massey does a fine job and Grant wonderfully slides into the increasingly harried everyman.
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