EYE OF THE CAT 1969

Why this nifty little thriller is so forgotten and nowhere to be found today is a mystery. It's really a rather intriguing, if sometimes uneven, attempt at mixing Hitchcockian suspense with the kind of supernatural theater of the macabre one might associate with an old episode of Night Gallery. Prior to its release in theaters, Universal Studios generated considerable public interest with TV ads that prominently featured footage of a little old lady in a runaway wheelchair careening helplessly towards traffic (backwards yet!) down a particularly precipitous slope of one of San Francisco's many hills. As a San Francisco resident at at the time, these commercials made Eye of the Cat the must-see movie of the summer of '69 as far as I was concerned.

This scene, which owes more than a little to Hitchcock, is enough to make Eye of the Cat a must-see. 

To clarify, said “little old lady” in the film is three-time Oscar-nominee, Eleanor Parker, who was just 46 at the time. Although unfamiliar to me then, Parker, just four years after The Sound of Music, was another talented actress "of a certain age" (a la Jennifer Jones, Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Bette Davis, and Tallulah Bankhead) who found herself prematurely relegated to “horror hag” roles in youth-centric 60s thrillers that took as a given audiences finding women over the age of 30 to be as grotesque as Hollywood apparently did. Eye of the Cat, which has never had a DVD release and seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth, was one of the earliest films to exploit the subtle malevolence and flagrant creep-out factor of amassing animals; a trend that blossomed into a full-blown horror sub-genre in the 70s with films like Willard, Empire of the Ants, Kingdom of the Spiders, and the laughably non-threatening Night of the Lepus (giant bunnies!). I saw Eye of the Cat at San Francisco's Embassy Theater on Market Street, the first show of its first weekend in release. Not being much of a fan of cats (that has since changed) the movie fairly gave me the willies and in short, scared the hell out of me...but that didn't stop me from sitting through it three times.

Gayle Hunnicutt as Kassia Lancaster
"Just another beautiful girl with all the wrong values."

Michael Sarrazin as Wylie
"In good mirrors you can see that once I was disastrously beautiful."

Eleanor Parker as Aunt Danielle (Aunt Danny)
"Nowadays you can't depend on natural causes."

Tim Henry as Luke
"It's not a good idea to take cats lightly."

Joseph Stefano, screenwriter of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, penned this original screenplay about feline seductress Kassia Lancaster (“It sounds like a cell door slamming shut.”) and her plot to secure the fortune of an ailing San Francisco matron (Parker) by returning to the lonely dowager her beloved derelict nephew, Wylie (Sarrazin), and arranging for her subsequent murder once her will has been altered in his favor. Danielle (or Aunt Danny as she's affectionately/derisively known) is a near-invalid suffering from acute emphysema and lives in a cavernous San Francisco mansion with Wylie’s younger brother, Luke (newcomer Tim Henry), who waits on her in apathetic servitude, and roughly a hundred overprotective cats, the sole benefactors of her will. Kassia's diabolical plan hits a major snag when it's discovered that Wylie, the linchpin of the whole operation, is plagued by crippling ailurophobia (a deathly fear of cats).

In addition to this feline homage to Psycho, Eye of the Cat features a wonderful score by Lalo Schifrin (Cool Hand Luke) with obvious Berrnard Hermann overtones.

Eye of the Cat is not really the “When Good Animals Go Bad” creature-features thriller its title would suggest (a plus, I might add) but rather an intriguing attempt to modernize those murder and passion crime thrillers that once typified film noir (Gayle Hunnicutt, with mounds of big, 60s hair, is a terrifically ruthless femme fatale) combined with the supernatural chill-thrill of say, classic horror of Val Lewton (Cat People). I’d like to report the experiment was wholly successful, but it kind of loses steam in the middle only to end just as it’s becoming the shuddery thrill ride it should have been all along. Perhaps in more resourceful hands than those of director David Lowell Rich (The Concord… Airport ’79, need I say more?), Stefano’s somewhat colorless script could have lived up to the promise of the film’s sensational (silent) pre-credits sequence.

Eye of the Cat gets off to a very winning start by way of a stylish expository pre-credits sequence that mirrors the multi-image / split-screen opening sequence of The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), and effectively predates Brian De Palma's subsequent appropriation of the device.

The raw material is certainly there: an enigmatic villainess; the San Francisco setting (a wonderful city for thrillers—the picturesque angles of all those hills never fails to unsettle); the misleadingly simple murder scheme; the probable subterfuge and concealed motives behind virtually each action engaged in by every character at all times; and the fascination of cats and their inherent mystery. But it's precisely there being such a rich mine of chiller material to vein that makes one wish Joseph Stefano's script were more up to the task set forth by the premise. Luckily, Eye of the Cat's gratuitously cryptic dialog is delivered by a better-than-average cast, all of whom appear gleefully game for this kind of psyco-fright stuff; and the enjoyably peevish malevolence at the heart of the story greatly mitigates Mr. Stefano's penchant for trying to generate mystery by leaving his characters and their motivations underdeveloped and unexplored to a maddening degree.

That's Mark Herron there in the mint green Nehru smock, Judy Garland's 4th husband (her 2nd gay husband). He has a small role as Belmondo (one name only, please), owner of an elite San Francisco spa.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

Any dog can be scary in real life, but for me to be made afraid of one onscreen, it has to be one of those ugly, aggressive breeds like a Rottweiler or a Pit Bull or at least a rabies-infected killing machine like Cujo (who was, on the whole still pretty cute,). Cats, on the other hand, merely have to be themselves. Cute or creepy, cats introduce an element of uncertainty just by showing up and they always appear to be operating under their own mysterious, sinister agendas. (This calls to mind a Night Gallery episode I once saw that made use of a quote from Samuel Butler’s novel, Erewhon: “Even a potato in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him which serves him in excellent stead.” If ever two words perfectly summed up my impression of cats, it’s the words “low cunning.”)

Pussy Galore
The trainer for the armies of cats used in Eye of the Cat was the late Ray Berwick, who also served as bird trainer on Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. He shared his feline training techniques in a well-received book published in 1986.

My long-held distrust of cats played into the effectiveness of Eye of the Cat the same way a childhood spent in Catholic schools played into my enjoyment of Rosemary’s Baby the year before: it wasn't compulsory, but it helped. And what I like about both films is that in their basic structure, they work perfectly fine whether one buys into the supernatural angle or not.

Eye of the Cat generates genuine tension as a crime caper thriller, keeps you guessing as a psychological suspense flick, and works your nerves as a supernatural horror film about potentially pernicious pussycats (hee hee). With so many plots to juggle, Eye of the Cat can perhaps be forgiven the mood-killing miscalculations of throwing in an obligatory 60s party scene and a lengthy “love montage.” (For some reason, the 70s was the era of the romantic montage. This cheap and economic go-to device for writers unable to plausibly convey a developing romance has ground many a promising film to a grinding halt. Perhaps the worse offender being Clint Eastwood’s 1971 directorial debut, Play Misty for Me, in which a pretty good suspense thriller takes a 20-minute nap while Clint gives us a Carmel, California travelogue and an infomercial for The Monterey Jazz Festival.)

What's New, Pussycat?

PERFORMANCES:

As a longtime fan of glamorous tough broads in movies, it’s unlikely Gayle Hunnicutt’s Kassia Lancaster wouldn't emerge my favorite character in the film. She states early on, “I’m not afraid of anything!” and spends the rest of the film proving it. Dangerous, self-assured, authoritative, and without a doubt the strongest, smartest character in the film; female characters of her stripe would become extremely rare in the 70s as male-dominated “buddy films” grew in popularity. The fantastic-looking Gayle Hunnicutt gives an assured performance whose measured severity plays nicely off of Michael Sarrazin's more easygoing style.

I love that the first time we see Kassia, she's shown licking her fingers and grooming herself like a cat.  

Eleanor Parker looks wonderful and is very good in an underwritten part that casts her unsympathetically with little foundation. Cast as a salacious older woman, Parker certainly doesn't embarrass herself as Jennifer Jones did in a similar role in Angel, Angel, Down We Go that same year, but in having already played a horny older woman in 1965's The Oscar, one wishes the eternally classy actress found something else to do if this was the only kind of role Hollywood was throwing her way.

The loss of two-thirds of her lung tissue barely puts a crimp in Aunt Danielle's libidinous urges. Here she's seen languishing in an oxygen tent in what is apparently the bed from Love, American Style. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:

I love a thriller that keeps me guessing, and Eye of the Cat is splendid at throwing so many red herrings and false clues into the pot that no matter where you think the film is headed, it veers elsewhere. But as good as a film as it is and as much as I found it scary and suitably creepy as a pre-teen, I'd be lying if I said that the prodigious amount of male flesh on display in Eye of the Cat didn't in part inspire those three viewings at the Embassy in 1969.

Perhaps in an effort to convey his character's freewheeling ways, Michael Sarrazin spends a great deal of the film shirtless or with nudity artfully concealed. Similarly, dreamboat material co-star Tim Henry (bottom pic with Eleanor Parker) adds a touch of homoerotic interest to a film that already overflowing with adultery, promiscuity and possible incest. Hooray for Hollywood in the 60s!

THE STUFF OF DREAMS: 

One of the reasons I wish Eye of the Cat would get a legitimate DVD release is so that I can relish the San Francisco locations, digitally enhanced. The film had lots of great location shots that establish a wonderful sense of time and place.

A process shot, to be sure, but behind Sarrazin's head can be seen San Francisco's Paris Theater on Market Street.

At the top, the corner of Octavia and Washington in San Francisco as seen today. To the left is the exterior of Aunt Daniell's cat-filled mansion, to the right, the hill that features so prominently in the plot (below, the site in 1969).

Eye of the Cat is no classic, but it's a dynamo of a thriller that doesn't deserve its obscurity. It certainly holds up for me after all these years and still packs a punch despite my having overcome my own youthful antipathy toward cats.

"They do come back..."

Copyright © Ken Anderson