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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