Catman of Paris (1946)
IMDB meta-data is 1 hour and 5 minutes, rated 5.5 by 188 cinematizens.
Genre: Horror.
Verdict: 2D (derivative and dreary)
Beret-wearing cool cats are on the prowl in a studio set of one street of fin de siècle Paris. So? Handsome, after years in the mysterious Orient, returns to Paris and publishes a novel. So? While called a novel the book’s pages reveal all about a cooked-up trial twenty years before. So deep and dark was this Dreyfus trial that all records were sealed for a long time to protect the guilty. Yet here are all the details in Handsome’s novel. Sacré bleu!
The book sells and the publisher rakes in the francs. However, the forces of order in Gerald Mohr pursue Handsome who wrinkles his brow. All the chaps have RAF pencil moustaches which they compare in a Mo-off.
Periodically, Handsome has blinding headaches (when reading the tax notices) and Jules Verne visions of snow and ice, lightning, and what looks like a re-entry space capsule bobbing in an ocean, a scene repeated at least three times. Coinciding with these blackouts bad meow occurs.
The first victim is the archivist charged with sitting on the secret trial records. Hmm, Sureté Plod is sure Handsome has a motive, assuming he purloined the info found in the novel from the victim and then topped him to seal his lips. (To do that Handsome turned himself into a cat to murder this aged archivist. Sure.) The plot thickens when Handsome breaks with fiancée who is then murdered. The archivist and the belle were clawed to death off camera. Again Plod looks to Handsome, who, rejecting the fraternity brothers’ offer to alibi him, cannot account for his whereabouts, and never does, by the way.
Next to go is the IRS officer who sent the tax bill. (Just kidding.)
Meanwhile, Handsome has taken up with the daughter of his agent who thereafter faints, screams, and swoons on direction, though even she is wondering what is going on with Handsome. Only his mentor knows he is innocent. See if you can figure out why. Nudge. Nudge.
The film includes a bar fight with balsa wood furniture, sugar glass, and a back-projected chase in horse-drawn wagons straight out of Stagecoach. What’s the genre again? That stalwart of the dusty trail John Dehner appears in the bar fight, having wandered in from the set of a Western in the adjoining sound stage.
There is a marvellous scene when on leave from Rocky Jones’s Space Ranger Professor Newton explains to Plod that once every now and again Jupiter aligns with the Super Bowl and then by the conjunction of bollox transmigration from cat to man occurs. Why cats? (Why care?) The scriptwriter did not know either. The scene is amusing for the enthusiasm of the Prof for the nonsense, the credulity of the Chef de le Sureté, and Mohr’s sarcastic eye-rolling. While the critics linked to the IMDb label this scene as Nonsense on Stilts, it may remind some of decanal budget meetings when nonsense is gravely set forth and all mortals must pretend to believe it.
When Handsome goes Jules Verne again, Daughter goes to Mentor for help and he obliges. It takes no brains to see what is coming at this point. Ontario’s own Douglas Dumbrille is Mentor; as always, he nails it.
We never do find out what Handsome was doing during his headache absences nor what the space capsule has to do with him. Nor do we care. We do not find out about the secret trial either, but who cares.
John Dehner compiled 287 credits, having started as an animator in the Disney business. Boomers will recognise him instantly from a myriad of television roles.