CAT OF THE DAY 073: MOONRISE KINGDOM

Posted on January 1, 2013 by annebillson

moonrisekingdom02CAT OF THE DAY 073: MOONRISE KINGDOM (2012)

Wes Anderson’s fable, set on an island off the coast of New England in 1965, is silly, sweet, romantic and altogether adorable. The eclectic soundtrack features Benjamin Britten, Hank Williams, Françoise Hardy and Alexandre Desplat.

On 2nd June, 2012 I posted this on Ryan Gilbey‘s FaceBook wall :

Loved it. A children’s adventure for adults. I think Anderson’s films look as though they’ve been made by a precocious 12 year old, and the reason this and Rushmore work so well is that the emotion in them seems authentic, albeit of the sort that might be experienced by a 12 year old, whereas the emotion in his other films (apart from Mr Fox) is like a 12 year old’s fuzzy notion of what grown-up emotions might be.

I didn’t mention the cat, though Moonrise Kingdom contains a recurring kitten motif. Twelve-year-old Suzy (Kara Hayward) is inseparable from her kitten; we see it in one of the very first frames. Then when she elopes with 12-year-old Sam (Jared Gilman), she takes the kitten along with her, in a cat-basket. The couple sets up camp on an idyllic beach (they call it “Moonrise Kingdom”), and the kitten is very much a part of their innocent yet intensely romantic ménage.

There’s an adorable dog in the film too; the dog comes to a sad end, but at no time is the kitten ever imperilled.

Later in the film, we see the kitten grown into a young cat, to denote the passage of time, a narrative device that can also be seen in Little Women (1994), the subject of CAT OF THE DAY 065.

A Happy New Year to all cats everywhere!

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CAT OF THE DAY 072: THE LEOPARD

Posted on December 31, 2012 by annebillson

leopard01CAT OF THE DAY 072: IL GATTOPARDO (aka THE LEOPARD) (1963)

You’ll need good eyesight for this one. Since it’s from the last scene of Luchino Visconti’s magnificent film of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa‘s novel, it might be construed as a SPOILER! But honestly, I don’t think so. It’s not that kind of film.

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In the very last shot, Sicilian aristocrat Prince Don Fabrizio Salina (Burt Lancaster) has left the ball and is just embarking on his slow, symbolic walk into the obscurity of a dark street.

But wait! The cat-loving viewer’s attention is suddenly distracted by a ginger and white puss which saunters up to Salina. Totally unfazed by the tolling of a bell, Nino Rota’s swelling soundtrack and the weight of history bearing down on the film’s central character, Ginger & White Puss miaows persistently, changes its mind and turns its back on Salina, scratches its ear, disappears into a doorway and then, just when you think it’s gone for good, pops out again and turns its arse towards the camera as the word FINE (“The End”) comes up.

leopard03

Too late, you remember you were supposed to be watching Salina, but he’s already vanished into the darkness! Which is perhaps the whole point. Job well done, Ginger & White Puss.

I’ve often wondered how much of the cat’s performance was improvised.

Apologies if you came up against a “page not found” message earlier. Slight clicking-wrong-button mishap this morning. Hope it’s fixed now.

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CAT OF THE DAY 071: THE BLACK CAT

Posted on December 30, 2012 by annebillson

blackcatfulci02CAT OF THE DAY 071: BLACK CAT (aka GATTO NERO) (1981)

Mad Patrick Magee: “We need each other. We are bound together by hatred. He wants to kill me.”

Incredulous Mimsy Farmer: “But he’s only a cat!”

Mad Patrick Magee: “Mmm. A cat… that sooner or later will kill me. And there’s nothing I can do to prevent it.”

SPOILERS after the black cat (though even if you know what’s going to happen, it doesn’t mean you won’t be left scratching your head. It’s a Lucio Fulci film.)

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Lucio Fulci’s Black Cat, although “liberamente tratto dal raconto Il Gatto Nero de Edgar Allan Poe” is an atmospheric murder mystery with a few splashes of gore, set in a quiet English village, but a little confusing on the story front. Is the black cat acting out Magee’s murderous wishes, or is it simply a random psycho cat which likes to kill people?

And why does Magee need the cat to act out his wishes anyway, since he seems perfectly capable of knocking Mimsy Farmer unconscious and bricking her up in his cellar under his own steam? If the cat really can hypnotise its victims into crashing their cars, how come it lets Magee slip a Mickey Finn into its moggynosh? Can it really carry keys through locked doors, and teleport mysteriously from place to place? Does it come back from the dead, or not? And if it’s such an evil cat, why does it…? Oh, I give up.

blackcatfulci03

What is incontrovertible is that Black Cat is a Major Cat Movie, and Sergio Salvato, unlike a lot of other cinematographers, knows how to film a black cat so you can actually see the cat, as opposed to a cat-shaped black hole; the cat gets many very fine close-ups. Salvato also gives us super footage of rural Buckinghamshire, some of which can be seen in this beautiful credits sequence set to Pino Donaggio‘s equally beautiful score. In terms of feline credits sequences, this surely ranks up there with the classic Saul Bass one from Walk on the Wild Side, already featured as CAT OF THE DAY 024.

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CAT OF THE DAY 070: EVA

Posted on December 29, 2012 by annebillson

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CAT OF THE DAY 070: EVA (2011)

(Note: Alex’s robot cat has been behaving exactly like a real cat.)

Max the Factotum: “Alex, this cat must be faulty. Maybe you should repair it.”

Alex the Inventor: “Gris is a free robot. He does what he wants. Maybe he doesn’t conform to all the safety regulations, but he’s good company.”

German actor Daniel Brühl (who was born in Barcelona, has a Spanish mother and speaks fluent Spanish) plays a cybernetic genius called Alex in the feature debut of Spanish film-maker Kike Maillo. It’s a beautiful, bewitching science fiction movie set in a retro-looking world in which robots are an accepted part of everyday life, though they are still being perfected.

Alex has a robot cat.

By the end of the film, you will want one too.

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There are a couple of quick shots of the cat in the trailer, which ill-advisedly tries to make the film look like a sci-fi thriller.

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CAT OF THE DAY 069: THE SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR

Posted on December 28, 2012 by annebillson

blackcatso[1]CAT OF THE DAY 069: LJUBAVNI SLUCAJ ILI TRAGEDIJA SLUZBENICE P.T.T.  (aka THE SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR aka LOVE AFFAIR, OR THE CASE OF THE MISSING SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR) (1967)

Cat of the Day 069 demanded something erotic, of course. Since I couldn’t think of a film depicting cats having oral sex (as opposed to mere fastidious grooming) here is one of the most famous, evocative and erotic cat-related images in films, one that avid young film buffs like me saw repeatedly reproduced in books such as Amos Vogel and Scott MacDonald’s Film as a Subversive Art or L’erotisme au cinéma long before we ever got a chance to see it on screen.

In his second feature, Serbian film-maker Dusan Makavejev relates the tragic love affair between a young switchboard operator and an older man, a Turkish sanitation expert, but interweaves this story with newsreel footage (including a history of the grey rat), breaches of the Fourth Wall, and lectures from sexologists and criminologists – the sort of heady socio-political-sexual cocktail the director would be whipping up again in his next and probably most famous film, W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism.

It has been aeons since I saw The Switchboard Operator in the course of an early, diligent plod through the must-see films of east Europe (Menzel, Forman, Wajda, Jancsó, Chytilová, Jires et al) but what has really stuck in my head across the years are the images of the switchboard operator baking. Eat your heart out, Nigella.

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CAT OF THE DAY 068: THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN

Posted on December 27, 2012 by annebillson

incredibleshrinkingman06CAT OF THE DAY 068: THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957)

Cats feature in a great many horror and fantasy movies. They leap out at people, they hiss and scratch and bite, or they lurk in a sinister fashion. Sometimes they have paranormal powers, or cause accidents with their uncanny feline senses.

Cat lovers, on the whole, find all these attempts to make cats frightening at best amusing, at worst a bit desperate. We’ve always been aware cats are predatory carnivores that look out for Number One – that, combined with their innate adorability, is a large part of their appeal – but it’s this very self-centredness that makes it hard to believe they would go out of their way to wreak physical harm on human beings. They just couldn’t be bothered. And anyway, we’re bigger than them.

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But what if we weren’t? Of all cats in films, the one I find the most terrifying is Butch in Jack Arnold‘s film of Richard Matheson‘s novel (scripted by the author). Scott Carey (Grant Williams) comes into contact with a sparkly mist and, a few months later, with some insecticide. It’s a devastating combination. He begins to shrink. As he gets smaller, naturally, he starts feeling less of a man. But that’s not the worst of it…

A moment’s inattention by his long-suffering wife, and Butch (who looks to me like a ginger tom, though the film is in black and white) slips in from the garden and corners Scott in the doll’s house where he has been living. After a grim pursuit and battle, Scott falls into the cellar; his wife, when she gets back from the shops, can find no trace of him and assumes he’s been eaten. “Carey’s death was the result of an attack by a common house cat, a former pet in the Carey home,” announces the TV newscaster.

The reason this is so terrifying is that, while cat-lovers have a hard time imagining a cat would jump out or attack us for no reason, we have absolutely no doubt at all that if we were to shrink down to the size of, say, a mouse, we would immediately be stalked, sadistically toyed with and eaten. Because that’s what cats do.

We’re not specifically informed that Butch has been put down after the unfortunate incident. But if your cat had just eaten your tiny husband, what would you do? Anyhow, here’s a picture of Butch in happier times:

incredibleshrinkingman01

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CAT OF THE DAY 067: TO CATCH A THIEF

Posted on December 26, 2012 by annebillson

tocatchathiefcat01[1]CAT OF THE DAY 067: TO CATCH A THIEF (1955)

“You want a leg or breast?” Not to mention those fireworks.

Hitchcock at his sauciest, Grace Kelly at her glossiest and Cary Grant at his most debonair (who else could get away with that absurd spotted cravat, or that ridiculous stripey T-shirt?) combine in this marvellous piece of froth set on the French Riviera, where wealthy socialites are having their precious baubles pinched by an audacious cat burglar. Minimal plot plus maximum elegance plus Grace’s show-stopping wardrobe add up to le dernier cri in stylish movie escapism, though the way she takes those hairpin bends in her Sunbeam Talbot Alpine Roadster (albeit with the help of back projection) might give you pause for thought, given what happened 27 years later.

Anyhow, Grant is not just known as “The Cat”, he also has a cat.

ETA: THE CASE OF THE MISSING CAT

Tim Lucas (film critic, novelist and editor/publisher of Video Watchdog) writes on FaceBook 5 January 2013:

I just watched the Blu-ray of Paramount’s TO CATCH A THIEF and, as mentioned to me before, the subliminal image of the cat seen on television prints of the film is not there, despite an otherwise ravishingly meticulous VistaVision restoration. According to DVD Savant‘s review of the 2002 DVD, it wasn’t in that either. Fingers crossed that I still have my Beta tape copy, but just in case, might anyone else here have an old TV/Beta/VHS copy of the film that might contain it, for frame-grabbing purposes?

I wrote about this in VIDEO WATCHDOG when I first discovered it, probably 15 or more years ago. But when Grace Kelly is driving Cary Grant at high speeds down those narrow roads and identifies him as “John Robie – The Cat!” Hitchcock planted a subliminal shot of a black cat, no more than a frame or two. I can’t even remember if I photographed it, or if I was able; in those days, I was working from Beta tape and shooting images off my TV screen with a camera, often getting a rollbar across the image, so I would take entire rolls of film of the same image so ONE would turn out publishable. I did get rid of a lot of Beta tapes and don’t know offhand if my Beta recording of TCAT survived the trashing. It was Beta tape #64… a very early recording, probably dating back to a (rough guess) TBS broadcast in the early ’80s.

I believe Robert Harris said that Paramount’s Blu-ray came from an archival Technicolor IB interpositive. It might be the source of any additional prints struck of the picture. It seems the subliminal has gone missing lo these past 30 years or thereabouts, but I did see it and did record it from TV. Now it seems I’ll have to find it, and pray that I didn’t toss it.

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And here’s another Hitchcock cat:

ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS SEASON 3 EPISODE 12: MISS PAISLEY’S CAT

“Oh, good evening. The leading man in tonight’s saga is an alley cat. He must be fed before each performance. It keeps him from eating the actors. Tonight he’s having finely chopped mice burger. Naturally, we used nothing but contented mice. For two weeks, they were fed nothing but tranquilizers. Now, you should see tonight’s story – Miss Paisley’s Cat…”

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CAT OF THE DAY 066: JOYEUX NOËL

Posted on December 25, 2012 by annebillson

joyeux noelfelixnestorCAT OF THE DAY 066: JOYEUX NOËL (aka MERRY CHRISTMAS) (2005)

The Western Front, Christmas Eve 1914. German, Scottish and French troops cease fire and climb out of their respective Trenches to start singing, playing football and share drinks and cigarettes. This really happened.

Meanwhile, a French soldier (Dany Boon, above) finds that Nestor the cat, whom he has known since kittenhood, has been fraternising with the Germans, who have been calling the cat Felix.

Typical cat behaviour, in other words. Cosy up to more than one household at once in the hope of getting twice the amount of tuck.

In real life, the cat was arrested and executed for treason. This really happened too. Writer-director Christian Caron filmed this scene, but cut it from the film on the grounds that no audience would ever believe it. So let’s pretend it never happened.

A very Merry Christmas to cats everywhere!

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CAT OF THE DAY 065: LITTLE WOMEN

Posted on December 24, 2012 by annebillson

littlewomen02CAT OF THE DAY 065: LITTLE WOMEN (1933 & 1994)

Christmas won’t be Christmas without any kittens.

There are at least four kittens in this picture; see if you can spot them. See also if you can spot Winona Ryder as Sporty March, Kirsten Dunst as Baby March, Trini Alvarado as Posh March and Claire Danes as Weepy March.

Louisa May Alcott’s girls’ classic has been filmed several times, the last major adaptation being in 1994. The first big talky version was in 1933, directed by George Cukor, starred Katherine Hepburn as Sporty, and featured basketfuls of kittens.

littlewomen3301The 1949 Technicolor adaptation, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, seems to be a kitten-free environment. (Do please correct me if I’m wrong; one day I’ll put my June Allyson allergy on hold long enough to watch it all the way through again, and if need be will come back and rewrite this then.) But as compensation, here is a publicity still of Elizabeth Taylor (in costume as Baby March) with a kitten. As well as another, later picture of Elizabeth Taylor (not in costume as Baby March) with another kitten.

liz     taylorolderwithkitty 2

And here’s an article I wrote about Sisters in the Movies for the Guardian a couple of years ago.

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CAT OF THE DAY 064: THE AWFUL TRUTH

Posted on December 23, 2012 by annebillson

theawfultruth03[1]CAT OF THE DAY 064: THE AWFUL TRUTH (1937)

In The Awful Truth, the characters played by Cary Grant and Irene Dunne are very much dog people. They have a dog called Mr Smith, played by a Wire Fox Terrier called Skippy, who also played Asta in The Thin Man (1934) and its sequels.

Mr Smith is the subject of a custody dispute between Grant and Dunne, who after a series of misunderstandings are going through a divorce, even though it’s clear they are still mad about each other. Skippy accordingly gets lots of screen time and cute dog reaction shots. But is the dog instrumental in getting the couple back together?

No. That’s why films need cats.

SPOILERS after the picture. (But hey, it’s a classic screwball “Comedy of Remarriage” so how unexpected could it possibly be?)

theawfultruth04[1]As the hour of their impending divorce approaches, Dunne and Grant end up having to spend the night in adjoining rooms at her Aunt Patsy’s cabin in the middle of nowhere. The door between the rooms keeps rattling, preventing them from falling asleep. At first, they (and we) think the rattling is due to to a draught coming through Grant’s open window.

But no, it’s a cat pushing at the door, deciding in that inimitable way cats have that it would rather be on the other side. So instead of falling asleep in their separate beds, Cary and Irene get back together.

Job done!

And that’s why movies have cats in them!

theawfultruth05[1]And here, because I love you, is the funniest scene from the film. No dogs or cats, just Irene Dunne dancing with Ralph Bellamy, and Cary Grant’s reaction shots. Sublime.

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