This 1944 movie, another Frank Capra-directed comedy classic, captures the lunacy of the original Joseph Kesserling stage play, thanks to a screenplay by Julius and Philip Epstein and a fearlessly funny lead performance by Cary Grant as drama critic Mortimer Brewster. Raymond Massey is just fine as Jonathan Brewster, the villainous brother whose botched plastic surgeries have him looking like Frankenstein’s monster – but those references must have elicited even bigger laughs in the 1941 Broadway play, when Jonathan was played by Boris Karloff himself. Among the rest of the movie’s supporting cast, I particularly adore watching Peter Lorre as Jonathan’s henchman Dr. Einstein and Edward Everett Horton, the future narrator of Fractured Fairy Tales, as Mr. Witherspoon, head of the local insane asylum. I love this film.