Kind of a grim story. I guess it was a comedy. It was based on a crime novella. The FBI is looking for two bank robbers who stole a vast sum of money and abducted a bank teller who they plan to murder. One of the crooks, Frank Gorshin, likes cats and lets a Siamese cat into the apartment. Their hostage puts her wristwatch around the cat's neck and sends it on its way. This is what prompts cat owner Hayley Mills to call the FBI who sent agent Dean Jones to look into it. They decide to tail the cat hoping to follow it to the kidnappers' apartment.
Dean Jones is allergic to cats and sneezes convincingly, not something every actor can do. At one point he holds his nose to keep from sneezing which can blow your ear drums out. How many children were injured imitating what they saw in this movie?
Hayley Mills and Dorothy Provine as sisters who speak with different accents. Elsa Lanchester in a mixed marriage with American William Demarest. With Ed Wynn.
Bobby Darin sang the theme song.
There was some suspense over the fate of the hostage (Grayson Hall) although you knew nobody was going to die. The two sisters have terrible boyfriends (Tom Lowell and Roddy McDowall) who keep forcing their ways into the girls' house.
I don't know how I would have reacted to this as a kid. I liked TV violence, but I wanted realistic violence. This movie had a slapstick sequence where Dean Jones follows the cat in foot into a drive-in movie theater. The theater manager and an employee suffered what might have been serious injuries chasing him and the cat, violence that might have been saved for kidnappers and would-be murderers.
Directed by Robert Stevenson who died in 1986. He directed several Disney movies including The Absent-Minded Professor, the first movie Paul Schrader saw when he was seventeen. The Schrader family was in a hyper-conservative Calvinist church which didn't approve of movies. I don't know if Stevenson knew that Schrader said he was "very unimpressed" by it.
Available on The Criterion Channel along with other cat movies including Disney's The Cat from Outer Space.
I guess they couldn't get Harry & Tonto.
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