Cinema Betty

Love Can Wait had a passel of relations scattered about England.  Dr. James Tait-Bouverie had an embarrassment of aunts--ranging to irascible but tolerable to patronizing and intolerable. To that end, I recommend:

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

Kate needs a job but, for heavens sake, don't offer her any elderberry wine!

Mortimer (Cary Grant) finds a corpse hidden in a window seat and assumes that Teddy has committed murder under some delusion, but his aunts explain that they are responsible ("It's one of our charities"). They have developed what Mortimer calls the "very bad habit" of ending the presumed suffering of lonely old bachelors by serving them elderberry wine spiked with arsenic, strychnine and "just a pinch of cyanide". The bodies are buried in the basement by Teddy, who believes he is digging locks for the Panama Canal and burying yellow fever victims.


At Odds With Love features a horrid hospital in the back-of-beyond.  What says chancy medical service like:

The Disorderly Orderly (1964)

An orderly has "neurotic identification empathy" - a psychosomatic problem that causes him to suffer the symptoms of others and interferes with his ability to function effectively on the job. 

It's a Jerry Lewis vehicle so I assume you know what you're in for.  I rather like him, myself (I get wobbly when a man puts on a pinky ring), so don't find the slapstick terrible.  I warn you, though, that a reviewer said of it, "[The film] runs dry at the end of the first third — like a juiceless watermelon — and splits open, with about the same results."