Arsenic and Old Lace. (1944) available on various platforms, is a black comedy that exudes talent and mastery.
A playful and witty classic comedy, in the well-known style of "Screwball Comedy", translatable as crazy comedy that perfectly includes the insanity of all its protagonists.
A story of absurd situations but full of charm, where the characters do not abide by the conventional and dominant norms of behavior in the society in which they live.
Here everyone is crazy, most of them to the highest degree and concentrated in a singular family.
All varnished with an intelligent, corrosive and hilarious black humor that constitutes an exquisite and elegant divertimento.
It is a scrupulous adaptation with hasty fidelity of a theatrical comedy by Joseph Kesselring, masterfully filmed by Frank Capra.
The filmmaker uses the stage space cinematographically, moves the actors with a vitality and a sense of movement unusual in the theater of the time, and gives the characters' entrances and exits on stage a visual touch closer to cinema than to theater.
When, in the film, a character reappears after having been out of sight for a long time, his arrival does not constitute a theatrical effect, but makes it clear that it is not an effect of stage irruption, but the result of a personal process that has led him there.
[Image](https://crimereads.com/arsenic-and-old-lace/)
In this way, he avoids the scenic artifices, serving as an aid to capture the differences of the two expressive media from the staging.
Becoming a comedy of theatrical origin that is visually expressed in filmic style.
