On Criterion, there is a curated collection of movies titled Cat Movies, all movies featuring cats in significant roles. I watched some over the weekend, and these are my thoughts on them:
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen). The Coen Brothers film that was Oscar Issac's breakout starring role, a look at the early 1960s folk scene in Greenwich Village in New York City, where Issac plays a struggling folk singer whose stubborn temper gets him in his own way, and causing him to make bad, short-term decisions that cost him any future success in the long run. Some are refusing to compromise to join a musical trio; rejecting royalties on a novelty song for a one-time payment of $200 and the song ends up a big hit; drunkenly blowing up at a performer and it coming back to bite him, and more. Issac gave a really great performance of a jerk loser who could sing and play, but didn't have any other charisma or talent to make him a standout folk singer.
The cat is an orange cat that belongs to his friends, a cat that escapes out the door, locking Llewyn out, so he has to carry the cat around on the street and the subway while running his errands and checking up on his musical prospects. The cat later escapes again, and he chases it down the street, losing it, then finding it again, and feeling like the cat is giving him the runaround. It's fun seeing the orange cat, and Issac handled it well despite not liking cats in real life due to getting an infection from a cat bite. The Coens said the several cats they used on set were often difficult and hard to train, which is common for cats in Hollywood, with the exception of some well-known trained ones, like D.C. the Siamese cat in That Darn Cat in 1965. It will also be true for 1951's Rhubarb, which I also watched this weekend.
Cat People (1942, dir. Jacques Tourneur) is a classic 1940s horror film about repressed sexuality and being an immigrant and feeling different than others, told with a lot of shadows and sound effects and innuendo that made it feel more haunting and intense than just scary. French actress Simone Simon starred as Irena, a Serbian emigre who comes to New York City and falls in love and marries a man named Oliver (Kent Smith), but is worried that because of an ancient curse, that she will become a feline predator if she gives in to physical desire and intimacy. She is repressed and stands out as the obvious outsider, including other cats and animals hissing and reacting defensively in her presence.
And when her husband and his assistant Alice (Jane Randolph) begin to fall for each other, Irena discovers the emotional affair, and follows Alice around, terrifying Alice with the shadows and growls of a panther. The film really stands out in those moments of fear, as Alice is being tormented but cannot actually see the danger, just walking faster at night while feeling stalked by something supernatural, and quickly getting into any available buses or cabs that she can find for safety.
I really liked how this film played with a lot of shadowy imagery while using sound as horror, and how both Irena could be sympathetic as a werecat while also be a threat to another woman over jealousy. I had seen the 1982 remake, which benefited a lot from a looser standards on sexuality in film, as well as had excellent creature effects for the werecats, but this film is excellent for being a standout horror film in its repression and not showing everything onscreen.
Rhubarb (1951, dir. Arthur Lubin) A silly screwball comedy about a millionaire who bequeaths his fortune and his Brooklyn baseball team to a feral cat he adopted, and makes the team's publicist (Ray Milland) be his guardian. This was a goofy comedy I watched today, and really enjoyed. A feral stray cat (played by Orangey, a Hollywood-trained cat that also appeared in Breakfast at Tiffany's as Cat) fights dogs and hoards golf balls, snarling and hissing at everyone, but the millionaire (Gene Lockhart) loves his tenacious spirit, and adopts him and turns him into a spoiled housecat. After the will is read out, his snobby and uptight daughter (Elsie Holmes) is horrified that she won't get the whole fortune as his closest heir (just $6,000 a year, which is equivalent to $71,000 today), and the loser baseball team is laughed at for being owned by a cat. The publicist works to spin things around for the team (including Leonard Nimoy in an uncredited early role) by seeing the cat as a good luck charm, only to find out his fiancée (Jan Sterling) is allergic to cats, and he's legally bound to take care of the cat.
The cat becomes a media sensation to promote the team, and is brought to the games as a mascot, sitting with a leash on, with a rich old lady behind the seats to show off her cat to Rhubarb, and the whole thing just feels more embarrassing for a former mean street cat to be treated like a puppet for publicity.
William Frawley, best known as Fred Mertz from I Love Lucy, was also in the cast as the baseball team's manager, and he would debut on I Love Lucy that same year. The film used fourteen cats besides Orangey, and also had difficulties keeping the cats trained, having multiple cats for different skills and talents. Orangey's real disposition was close to Rhubarb's, running away or scratching and biting actors, with a reputation as the "meanest cat," or a "real New York type cat." I liked this one as a silly movie to watch, that mostly just felt dumb and light to watch.
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