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A Movie A Week: TRACK OF THE CAT (1954) I wish you thieving females would leave my bottle alone!
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with the next installment of A Movie A Week.
[For those who new to the column, A Movie A Week is just that, a dedicated way for me explore vintage cinema every week. I’ll review a movie every Monday and each one will be connected to the one before it via a common thread, either an actor, director, writer, producer or some other crew member. Each film, pulled from my DVD shelf or recorded on the home DVR (I heart TCM) will be one I haven’t seen.]
”Next week we follow composer Roy Webb over to William Wellman’s Robert Mitchum Vs. Evil Panther movie TRACK OF THE CAT. I’m hearing some really dreadful things about this family film, but what the hell. It’s Mitchum fighting a blood-thirsty giant cat. How bad can it really be?”
That’s how I ended last week’s AMAW. If today’s AMAW really was Robert Mitchum versus an evil panther this would have been a killer, kick-ass movie. But let this film serve as an example of expectation vs. reality. Instead of a powerful cat and mouse suspense film we get an extended episode of THE WALTONS.
And we don’t even get to see the goddamn panther! Not once! We hear it, we see a couple of dead cows and a POV shot as it attacks someone, but that’s it. I feel a little bit like Mr. Garrison after walking out of CONTACT, but instead of waiting the whole movie to see the aliens and then it turning out to “be her fucking father” I waited the whole damn movie to see something happen… SOMETHING, ANYTHING… and I don’t even get one moment of hunter vs. the hunted.
I guess my dream of this movie was a Technicolor version of THE GHOST AND THE DARKNESS and that’s not even a bit close to what the movie is.
That’s fine. My job as a film fan is to accept the movie on its own terms, but unfortunately the movie itself is boring as hell and not just in comparison with the movie I was hoping it’d be.
It’s also oddly made. The photography by William H. Clothier (THE ALAMO) is beautiful… at least in the exteriors, the snowy mountain vistas of the Aspen wilderness is just gorgeous. The interiors a pretty plain, but I guess that’s the point.
What you have with this movie is a family drama that, to be completely fair, could very well have been cutting edge at the time, but is now little more than cliché. The matriarch (Beulah Bondi) is on the surface a loving old woman, but in reality she’s a manipulative, controlling zealot. Her husband is a drunk with a whiskey bottle hidden in every nook and cranny of the house and all their children still live at home, none of them married off.
Curt (Mitchum) is the real man of the house, the alpha male. He’s a bully to the youngest of the brothers (Tab Hunter) and seems to only listen to reason when that reason is delivered by the older brother (William Hopper), who seems to be the lone voice of sanity in this family.
The flick opens when the ancient Indian man (called Joe Sam and played by Carl Switzer… yep, Alfalfa from Our Gang… in bad old age make-up that makes him look like he just slipped on a cheap Halloween old man mask) that lives with the family hears the cows in the pasture mooing as if frightened. It’s the first snow and this old injun’s family was killed by a mystical black panther many decades before during the first snow of the year.
So, he wakes the family, they hear the cows and know something’s up and go out to hunt the bear or cat or whatever is scaring the livestock. They find the carcasses of a few of the cows and Mitchum takes it upon himself to be the big bad hunter and track the cat.
If that had set up a movie about dysfunctional brothers tracking a killer cat there wouldn’t be any problems, but it’s not. What happens is Mitchum goes out alone against the cat and we spend the majority of the film back in the cabin with the family as all pretense of a happy domestic unit deteriorates when one of the sons ends up killed by the panther.
And they don’t call it is pan-thur, they keep calling it paint-her, which I’m sure is authentic to the time, but goddamn if it didn’t get under my skin for some reason. You ever have that happen? When a movie creates a new pet-peeve just for the run-time of said flick? Well, that happened with me and that word in this movie.
Teresa Wright and Diana Lynn are both pretty ladies and doubly so when photographed in Technicolor, but neither are characters I could relate to. Wright plays sister to the Bridges boys and spends most of the movie yelling at her mom and Lynn is engaged to Tab Hunter, the pretty, but not too bright and not too heroic brother. Trouble is she’s just as manipulative of Hunter as his mother is.
Final Thoughts: I just got fed up with the movie early on and it didn’t do anything to win me back. I’m not blind to my own expectations, but I’m also not a slave to them either. This movie could have been a pleasant surprise, but instead it ended up being a boring melodrama. Bleh.
Upcoming A Movie A Week Titles:
Monday, August 31st: THE PUBLIC ENEMY (1931)
Monday, September 7th: THE MAYOR OF HELL (1933)
Monday, September 14th: MIDNIGHT MARY (1933)
Monday, September 21st: AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS (1956)
Next week we follow director William A. Wellman over to a rather famous flick, THE PUBLIC ENEMY starring James Cagney and, if I’m not mistaken, the film that launched Cagney into superstardom. I have a weird feeling it might be a better movie than the one we talked about today. See you folks next week!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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Previous AMAWs:
April 27th: How To Marry a Millionaire
May 4th: Phone Call From A Stranger
May 11th: Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte
May 18th: Too Late The Hero
May 25th: The Best Man
June 1st: The Catered Affair
June 8th: The Quiet Man
June 15th: Rio Grande
June 22nd: The Getaway
June 29th: The Mackintosh Man
July 6th: The Long, Hot Summer
July 13th: Journey Into Fear
July 20th: How The West Was Won
August 3rd: Call Northside 777
August 14th: Rope
August 17th: The Seventh Cross
Click here for the full 215 movie run of A Movie A Day!
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I completely agree with everything said here having watched Track Of The Cat about 5 months back. What a tedious film!
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Drew aka Mori talking up this film just before he left I believe. Anyways he made it sound like panther vs Mitchum, so I caught it one morning on TCM...couldn't have said it better Quint. It's well acted and well directed. Just not what you think it's going to be and what you get is boring
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Having said that, Quint's never seen Public Enemy? Jeeze, I know there are a jillion movies I haven't seen, or really need to see again (Public Enemy is one I haven't seen in twenty years, and oughta watch again) . . . but, heck, Ain't It Cool News oughta give me a job.
I saw Jaws. Raiders. Star Wars. Done. I'm qualified. Gimme a job! No, seriously, I really need work. -
At least next week will go much much better for you....
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Look for the fresh prints.
Boom boom
(thanks to Adam and Joe for that one.) -
Aug 25, 2009 7:58:42 AM CDT
Just to see Alfalfa in a non-Little Rascals role
by grammaton cleric binks
I'd watch this.
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separatd at birth. Pick a Baldwin. Any Baldwin.
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But is also a movie I went in with too many expectations. I had problems with the pacing the editing for example. This could due to the fact that this is an OLD movie and you need to place some things in context. But having read a lot about it in advance it completely underwhelmed me. Not bad not great either
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I think that's hilarious.
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"Go to the cabin! eat the family!". Alas, it was not to be.
I just read the wiki on Alfalfa yesterday and did not realize he was the old indian. Boring movie. I really enjoyed The Mayor of Hell though. -
A couple of years before the movie, the radio show SUSPENSE did a one-hour adaptation of "Track of the Cat" with Richard Widmark as Curt. It's actually a solid and entertaining version of the story. ----
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comicsradio.blogspot.com -
Michael Douglas shoulda got an Oscar nod for best supporting actor. The movie is like a dramatic Horror film. Too bad this doesn't sound like it comes anywhere close to the coolness of The Ghost and the Darkness.
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In an interview the films director, William Wellman, talked about making "Track of the Cat" as a black and white film in color. With the exception of the red in Mitchum's coat and a splash of color on one of the women's costume everything is rendered shades of gray, black or white.
This is why the interiors looked so plain. Trees were shot with backlight to give them a stark look. According to Wellman he kept his plan a secret ffom everyone except the DP,William Clothier. He express his disappointment that no one seemed to notice his artistic touch when the film was released. Maybe they were to occupied looking for the cat to appear. Or too drowsy. -
It's something you really need to see.
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Yeah, that movie dragged. It took me 3 days to watch it. I'm not kidding. 3 days!
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