I hadn't seen That Darn Cat for years and years. I might have seen it in the 80s when VHS was the rentin' rage. I re-watched a lot of Disney films then. When I was refilling my queue the other week I noticed that they had both versions of the film so I added them. It's not the kind of thing I would go out and buy specifically, I would pick up a DVD if I saw it for 2-3 bucks.
It's based on a novel by Gordon and Mildred Gordon, they also wrote the screenplay with Bill Walsh. The director was Robert Stevenson. Dean Jones, Hayley Mills, Dorothy Provine, Roddy McDowall, Neville Brand and Frank Gorshin make up most of the main cast. There's that darn cat too. Keep an eye out for William Demerest and Richard Deacon.
It's all about some bank robbers hold up at their apartment. They've got a hostage and it turns out that the cat wonders in. The hostage lady takes advantage to put her wrist watch on the cat, with the letters h, e, and part of an l, scratched on the back.The cat stops at Hayley's place and she figures it might be a clue to the robbery. Dean's the FBI agent put on trailing the cat, Neville and Frank are the robbers, and Dorothy is the romantic interest for Dean. Hayley has a boyfriend, Tom Lowell, who is a surfer.
It turns out to be rather long, 156 minutes, and while there's a lot of stuff doing on, it could have been neater shorter. As it is, it rambles along and spends a lot of time on characters that don't contribute much other than dubious comedy. The nosy neighbor played by Elsa Lanchester is more annoying than comical. It was fun enough and I think I made the right decision not to order one from Amazon. I'll get to the 1997 remake with Christina Ricci soon.
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