The American invasion continues. But not even the presence of Seinfeld star Michael Richards as a sadistic killer can reconcile me to this bag of old bones by Joseph Kesselring: a Broadway comedy-thriller from 1941 based on the curious assumption that madness is cute.
Everyone, I suspect, remembers the plot if only from the Frank Capra movie: it's the one about the little old Brooklyn ladies who bump off elderly gentlemen apparently as an act of mercy. The bodies are then stashed in the cellar by a crazy nephew who thinks he's Theodore Roosevelt.
An even crazier killer-nephew arrives lugging a corpse of his own and accompanied by a zany plastic surgeon. But fortunately there is a third nephew on hand who, being a dramatic critic, isn't exactly a model of sanity but as a sense of morality.
The piece stems from a strong American tradition. In Hollywood there was the screwball comedy. And on Broadway in the 1930s there was a belief that dottiness was a token of individuality: the most famous example was You Can't Take it with You, which gaudily celebrated family wackiness.
But today the idea of serial killing as a symptom of harmless eccentricity seems somewhat faded. The one character left with any topical resonance is Teddy: a madman who believes he is president of the United States and orders troops into action against an invented enemy.
What strikes one most, however, is the amount of surplus flesh American comedy carried 60 years ago. It takes an age to crank up the plot and much of the first act is filled with in-jokes about theatre critics. "Mortimer hates the theatre," says one of the aunts. "He was so happy writing about real estate and then they just made him take this terrible night position."
And just when the plot is building to a climax, Kesselring introduces the passably funny but over-prolonged joke of a cop with a penchant for playwriting. Comedy today is quicker.
As director, Matthew Francis takes too long to build up the mania but gets decent performances from his cast. Richards lends Jonathan a cadaverous intensity. Stephen Tompkinson seems a curiously Wodehousian figure for a Broadway critic but has a nice look of baffled perplexity. And Marcia Warren and Thelma Barlow are suitably demure as the mercy-killing aunts.
But it is the minor characters who come off best: especially Paul Rider as the wild-eyed surgeon and John Guerrasio as the stage-struck cop. I couldn't help feeling that Ealing Studios did this kind of poison-in-jest comedy with infinitely more style.
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