'Cat' earned this honor by being the continuation of what would become director Dario Argento's 'animal' trilogy, following "Bird With The Crystal Plumage" and finishing up with the gruesomely bizarre "Four Flies On Grey Velvet".....all three of them prime example of the 'Giallo' genre we delved into in our previous post.....
In retrospect, Argento expressed disappointment in this film.....he didn't much care for it compared to his other work. At first, we didn't quite get his attitude......while not groundbreaking in any way, to us it seemed with a worthy enough followup to the first film.......a slick, cold, Hitchcockian whodunit liberally sprinkled with Argento's signature tropes......nervous hand-held camerawork, a pulsating Ennio Morricone score and of course, ghastly murders filmed with clinical dispassion.....(with the camera lingering on strangulation victims dying in pools of their own saliva...)
But we now sense his frustration may have come from the sheer conventionality of the movie, never anything more than a connect-the-dots mystery. A pure visualist, Argento clearly had bigger, crazier ideas in his head than could be expressed in something like 'Cat 'O Nine Tails'.....and he'd ultimately float into the upper levels of his imagination, making films that left logic and linear plotting far behind him. (You can see the tentative beginnings of this dreamlike style in "Four Flies", which we'll cover in the next post.....)
Once again, a loony psycho's on the loose, potentially among a group of research institute scientists tinkering with genetics. Our killer, born with an extra 'Y' chromosome which according to the script, signifies criminal behavior, doesn't want his little glitch made public for fear of damaging his promising career.( Damage his career? Huh? Say what? You gotta be kidding us......we know of a raging nutcase who probably has eighteen or more Y chromosomes.....and we elected him President.....)
Anyhoo.....as our Crazy Chromosome guy racks up his body count, (including a bravura murder at a train station), it falls to two amateur sleuths to hunt the creep down....a glib reporter (the platinum blonde James Franciscus) and a cheerfully nosy blind puzzle creator.(the cheerfully, potato-nosed Karl Malden......the movie's one arcane, fascinating moment comes from watching him, sightless, construct a crossword puzzle on his spacious work table) An indifferent, uninteresting dubbed-in-English contingent of Italian actors fills out the rest of the cast.....even the supposed sex object among this bunch, Catherine Spaak, appears barely awake and draped in the ugliest, most unflattering clothes we've ever seen on an International cinema babe.,...
There's still, however, plenty of guilty pleasure Argento-isms to savor here......a few knowing Hitchcock homages....to Grace Kelly's breakneck driving in 'To Catch A Thief' and the poison milk from 'Suspicion'....another one of Argento's lighter-than-air homosexual suspects, hitting on Franciscus.....Malden revealing he's not as helpless as he looks......and the film's most memorable moment, the killer and his extra chomosomes meeting a beautifully engineered fate......
Though not one of Dario's faves, the BQ still got some jollies out of "Cat 'O Nine Tails', so we'll still give it 3 murderous stars (***)........much more madness was on the way to complete this trilogy....solving a murder by viewing the last image on a victim's eyeballs?....count us in....on our next post.....
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