That Darn Cat!
(1965, U.S.) color 116 minutes
With: Hayley Mills (Patti Randall), Dean Jones (Zeke Kelso), Dorothy Provine (Ingrid Randall), Roddy McDowall (Gregory Benson), Neville Brand (Dan, bank-robber), Elsa Lanchester (Mrs. MacDougall), William Demarest (Mr. MacDougall), Frank Gorshin (Iggy, bank-robber), Richard Eastham (Mr. Newton), Grayson Hall (Magaret Miller), Ed Wynn (Mr. Hofstedder), Tom Lowell (Canoe Henderson), Richard Deacon (Drive-in Manager), Iris Adrian (Mrs. Tabin)
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Plot Outlines (imdb.com):
1/ A woman is kidnapped. While in captivity, she manages to send a message out with a wandering cat. The cat's owner calls the FBI. The FBI tries to follow the cat. Jealous boyfriends and nosy neighbours also get in the act.
2/ A young woman with an active imagination contacts the FBI when her cat DC (Darn Cat) comes home wearing a wristwatch. She's convinced its the tip-off to crack a bank robbery and kidnapping case that has the authorities baffled. An allergic agent is assigned to "tail" the cat to find the hostage, and laugh (and romance) follows
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Hot on the heels of the phenomenal MARY POPPINS, Disney comes up with an astounding, over-the-top romp through a most glaringly Freudian "Small Town USA." This weird, wacky and wonderful flick, primarily about emotionally and sexually frustrated teenagers, owes a great deal to the American International "beach party" movies of the era, as well as other assorted teen flicks.
The opening, a seamless montage of our title Siamese feline traipsing through town at night, effortlessly lording over his domain, is punctuated by a listless theme song sung by fading star Bobby Darin.
Cute pussy aside, the real star of this film is the adorable Disney perennial, Ms. Mills. Mills, in her last role for Disney, plays a fresh, coquettish teen ripe with sexual urges. It is almost unbearable watching the bubbly young Hayley; with her flushed red cheeks, blossoming tight sweaters and pulsating lips, it looks as if she is constantly in the fevered throes of near-orgasm. Indeed, the sexual situations and tensions in this film are palpable and many-layered.
Hayley has a beatnikish, Dobie Gillis-type boyfriend who only has eyes for bad movies and luncheon meats! Her spinsterish, twenty-something sister (Dorothy Provine) is stalked by a hypercritical, repressed gay mama 's boy (a very spooky Roddy McDowell). So both chicks are frustrated as hell and ready for anything when dapper, clean-cut
FBI man Dean Jones shows up to use their cat to track down escaped criminals, and sets up shop in the girls' bedroom!
The flimsy excuse for this glaring sexual dues-ex-machina is that's where the cat maintains headquarters. Jones is not blind to the stifling sexual atmosphere; in fact, he has a sneezing fit
whenever the cat approaches him. And if that fear-of-sex allegory is too fuzzy for you, during each of these allergy attacks, Hayley stands close to Jones and licks her glistening lips or flutters her pretty eyelids. Message received, loud and clear!
Though Hayley is more obvious in her obsession with older men (she even plans it so that she and Jones must "pretend" to be married
in order to foil the robbers; earlier, she pretends to be married to Ed Wynn in a terrific, terrified cameo), the older sister has the hots for Jones too, and in fact they eventually end up together, while Hayley manages to turn her recalcitrant Romeo into a grateful sexual being, but not before gossip abounds through the small-town rumor mill about the sheer oddness of two lovely virgin sisters living alone in a big house with the conspicuous and barely-explained absence of parents.
This odd setup takes an ominous turn when the nosy lady next door (Elsa Lanchester in a fabulous role), sees all sorts of strange men roaming in and out of the house at all hours of the night, and
comes to the conclusion that the girls are, at best, floozies, or at worst, prostitutes! Yipes, Uncle Walt! (You have to wonder if this is where Jack Hill got the premise for his magnificent black horror-comedy SPIDER BABY).
Sexual paranoia runs rampant through the film, as both the girls' boyfriends follow them at night to see if they're screwing around. While the girls play innocent, saying, "What did you think I was doing?" the deflated males' reply, though low-key, is telling: "Well, um, you know!"
The shockingly transparent sexual texture accrues with the implausible plot, in which groups of men hide behind bushes and fences and chase the small, naked title feline around town, "tailing" it as it were, to try to find the desired robbers. The fact that the cat is a male is immaterial; all would agree that cats are perceived as an overwhelmingly female archetype, and the notion of this roaming pussy being chased after by hordes of sniffing lawmen should surely not slip by even the laziest subconscious mind.
Furthermore, the bad guys, (an evil Frank Gorshin and a bumbling Neville Brand) have kidnapped a long-suffering mom-type. They treat her like dirt, traumatizing her with death-talk while making her do their subservient domestic chores around the hideout. Their treatment of her is borderline cruel, as deSadian as any Tarantino flick (though obviously less explicit), and if done on the screen today would raise immediate cries of sexism.
Although THAT DARN CAT! is inarguably about sex, sex and more sex, there are also some great allusions to the state of 1960's pop culture. Technical gadgets abound, such as mini-transmitters, hearing aids and a glimpse of an early, very primitive TV remote control. Early in the film, Hayley and her chump go to see a generic
drive-in flick called "Night of the Surfer," a lame amalgam of repetitive stock footage that mocks both youth pictures and horror flicks in one breath.
As an aside to what we're witnessing, Hayley mouths a delightful bit of cultural self-reference in a very funny line: "Don't you get the spooky feeling sometimes that we're watching the same movie over and over again, and they just change the title?" (I like to think that Uncle Walt snuck this line in as a sly dig to his then-hot Kiddie Matinee rival, K. Gordon Murray, who shamelessly did in fact do that very thing.)
Later, at the drive-in, when Hayley is having no luck getting her fella to respond to her, the cat jumps in front of the projector, and the drive-in audience sees the silhouette of a giant monster cat pawing a moth on the big screen, in another perfect reinforcement of the sexual agenda presently unreeling.
Alas, the real 1965 movie audience just wasn't ready to see a sexy Hayley, as this great flick did only fair-to-middlin' at the boxoffice and is, amazingly, considered one of Disney's minor films, when it is most assuredly a wigged-out, psychotronic masterpiece, very hip, very adult, way ahead of its time, a most surreal childs-eye view of teenage America, a dizzying gestalt-o-rama of intricately-woven 1960's social mores and prejudices, a high watermark for nymphet-lovers, PEYTON PLACE for neurotic tots and a bonanza for cult-film weirdoes.
DisneyCorp tried to reinvent the serio-comic magic thirty years later, in a pallid remake with the delectable Christina Ricci and some black guy, but no go. Hayley rules! Meow!!!
Video/DVD availability: VHS/DVD (Disney Home Video)
Patti (Hayley Mills) discovers the strange medallion bank roober placed in her cat, "DC".
Patti, Ingrid (Dorothy Provine) and Kelso (Dean Jones) are suprised by an intruder.
Kelso attempts to coax the pussy off Patti's bed.
Walt Disney Pictures / Buena Vista Pictures
Story: Gordon Gordon, Mildred Gordon (as "The Gordons")
(from their novel "Undercover Cat")
Screenplay: Bill Walsh
Music: Bob Brunner, Richard M. Sherman, Robert B. Sherman
Cinematography: Edward Colman
Produced by Walt Disney, Ron Miller, Bill Walsh
Directed by Robert Stevenson
Two styles of poster for THAT DARN CAT.
(images courtesy of moviegoods.com)
