Are cats creepy? We don’t think so. But some people have a problem with them, and filmmakers are always happy to serve up a dose of an audience member’s fears. Movies we’ve discussed that use cats as sources of terror include 1934’s The Black Cat, 1948’s The Creeper, 1970’s Kaidan nobori ryu, aka Black Cat’s Revenge, 1971’s Il gatto a nove code, aka, Cat o’ Nine Tails (mainly just on the posters, but what beautiful art), and 1973’s La morte negli occhi del gatto, aka Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye. Those are just the ones we’ve looked at here. The list goes on and on through dozens if not hundreds of movies. In literature we’ve had looks at Nancy Rutledge’s Blood on the Cat and Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s The Judas Cat. You get the point. The Cat Creeps, for which you see a pretty nice poster above, fits snugly into cinematic tradition.
In the movie a newspaperman named Fred Brady is assigned to dig up dirt on senate candidate Walter Elliot, who’s just been implicated in the murder of a former political rival fifteen years ago. Brady happens to be dating Elliot’s daughter, but says nothing about his conflict of interest and takes the assignment to keep it away from a vicious rival reporter. Immediately, Brady learns there are family secrets, which are mostly revealed during a trip made with Elliot, his lawyer, his daughter, an investigator, and two others to the isolated island home of the person who has made the accusations. That person ends up dead, and the more superstitious members of the party come to believe a black cat is possessed by her spirit. Weirdo mystic Iris Clive even promises the others that it will reveal the murderer.
The movie is billed as a mystery, which it is, but it’s a glib one, filled with one-liners and goofy looks. We were surprised to see Noah Beery in a major role as Brady’s sidekick. He’s best remembered these days as Jim Rockford’s father Rocky from The Rockford Files, which we’ve been watching the entirety of during the last year. Here he and Brady—between quips, piercing screams, and drop-dead faints from the entire female cast—manage to solve the puzzle tidily but uncompellingly. Even a couple of ending twists didn’t impress, and weaving the cat into it all required torturous screenwriting. But the mystery is never the point. This is an exercise in atmosphere—there’s a lot of shadowy creeping around, as promised by the title. It mostly works. For a period mystery you could do far worse. The Cat Creeps—which is unrelated to the identically titled film from 1930—premiered today in 1946.
“Creeps? What kind of weirdo names their cat Creeps?”
