Classy classics

Classy classics:
Playlists:
1. ARSENIC AND OLD LACE
Charming and entertaining comedy classic based on the play by Joseph Kesselring. It is Halloween in 1941 and in small house near cemetery live two sweet and dotty old ladies, spinsters who poison people "for charity". They then leave it to their nephew Teddy (who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt) to take them to the Panama Canal (the cellar) and bury them. It is another of their nephews Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) who returns home only to find out the family secret. Another nephew, sadistic gangster Jonathon, also returns to the home after years of fleeing the authorities. However he now looks like Boris Karloff (who played the role in stage but not in film) due to his alcoholic sidekick Dr. Einstein (Peter Lorre).

2.. HARVEY (1950).
Old-fashioned - meaning clean, sweet and well-made - comedy of a good-natured, mentally ill man (James Stewart) whose Ivory soap purity of mind is never sullied by people living in the ugly, dirty reality. Too much purity for you? Well, not for me, thank you, and I hope it will never remade. Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning play by Mary Chase, who also wrote the screenplay with Oscar Brodney and uncredited Myles Connolly, Harvey has the taxi driver saying about "normal" people and their sanity: "And you know what stinkers they are." Not a masterpiece, but a good, solid film, which does not exploit mental illness in modern, I-need-a-good-scrubbing-in-a-luxury-bath-way.
3. REBECCA (1940)
Based on the novel by Daphne DeMaurier and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, , Rebecca is a story of young newlywed (Joan Fontaine) in the Gothic mansion where the shadow of late Rebecca, her beautiful predecessor , is madly celebrated by obsessed housekeeper.
4. GASLIGHT. Gaslight Gothic! Cruel husband (Charles Boyer) terrorize his fragile wife (Ingrid Bergman) in Victorian London. Elegant psychological suspense.

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