So, get this: Dr. Molyneux, the elderly botanist who loves nothing more than his mimosa plants, also secretly authors crime novels under the pen name Felix Chapel -- but only because his wife insists they need the money. As it turns out, Molyneux gets the stories from his adopted daughter Eva, who in turn gets them from the milkman, who's madly in love with her. Everything would be fine if it wasn't for Chapel's relative, the Bishop of Bedford, who is crusading against Chapel's "dangerous" novels. The Bishop is not quite wrong because a man known as the Butcher Killer blames Chapel for his own crimes. When the bishop invites himself for dinner at Molyneux's house, hilarity ensues.

Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert, the team that gave the world "Children of Paradise," made this very silly movie in 1937. Throughout, between fits of giggles, I was reminded of "Arsenic and Old Lace," which features a similar ensemble of semi-deranged characters with rather lackadaisical attitudes toward murder. But a French movie set in Victorian London is bound to be much weirder than Frank Capra's Midwest, and "Drole de Drame" turns out to be much funnier, too.