Who Killed the Cat?

This looked like a mid 1950s film rather that one of 1966 especially as it was not in colour but the story suited this look. The old ladies were great and in the mould of an Ealing film and I half expected Alastair Sim or George Cole to pop up at any time.

An excellent "who dunnit" which keeps the audience guessing all the way to the end and very well cast possibly with "William Tell" being it it to attract some more cinema ticket buyers.

A must see for lovers of classic 1950s mystery films even it it was made in 1966. I changed my mind several times as to who the guilty party was and still got it wrong.

A nasty landlady is peeved because her late husband has left most of his estate to her stepdaughter. She takes it out on her boarders who are three lady pensioners. She raises their rent exorbitantly. One of the ladies has a cat which is then found poisoned to death. The boarders suspect their landlady is the killer. The landlady has been a thieving magpie helping herself to items from their rooms. For a moment the old ladies plan drastic revenge. But then the landlady is found poisoned to death anyway. This British mystery from Eternal Films has a fine senior cast. I enjoyed stage actress Ellen Pollock who plays a widow fantasizing about some rich grand past. Also entertaining is jeweler Mervyn Johns who keeps his safe permanently wide open. This is not Ladykillers or Arsenic And Old Lace but it is likely to appeal to fans of those movies.

When the owner of a boarding house dies, he leaves his modest property empire to his daughter under the care of her jeweller uncle "Henry" (Mervyn Johns) and her stepmother "Ruth" (Ellen Pollock). Turns out the stepmother is every bit as wicked as stereotype suggests - and soon she decides to send the daughter out to work and to up the rent for the three elderly lodgers who live with them - safe in the knowledge that they could never afford it. One of these ladies has a kitten that has an habit of getting into rooms he's not allowed in, and when he is found dead the old ladies assume he has been poisoned, and set a trap for the supposed murderess. When the matronly landlady is discovered dead in her bed shortly afterwards, all eyes point to a bottle of whisky, a jug of water and, well, just about everyone, really... It falls to Conrad Phillips ("Insp. Bruton") to get to the bottom of things. It's quite a cleverly layered little mystery this, the three old ladies reminding you of Katie Johnson, and the ending is certainly not what I was expecting. Mary Merrall ("Janet") overacts dreadfully as the daughter, and her scenes do spoil it a bit, but for the most part it's an agreeable, well and amusingly paced amalgam of stories that I rather enjoyed.

A quiet and an unassuming but superbly polished British 'whodunnit' with charming and most effective performances, this engaging entertainment, concerning the loss of an elderly lady's kitten and the bitter - but mercifully balmed - consequences of that small tragedy, will completely bore and baffle anyone under the age of about fifty.

Unless your tastes were informed by an older and now almost entirely extinct set of cultural values - as were my own - this little cinematic treat will convey little beyond the sort of tedium small children bridle at when forced to listen to adult conversation. Every generation is a degeneration of the human spirit. Bright minds and good works there still are, and thank goodness for them; nevertheless, the general quality of life becomes ever nastier. This is because there is more - of everything, naturally, which of course includes also more that is bad.

What there is of human fineness is consequently ever more thinly spread across an ever vaster and more insatiable range of need. So it is that between this little Island of Britain and the looming masses of burgeoning China an impassable historical gulf is being set, which is euthanising the nostalgia of a World, our little world, which is still so familiar to some of us, and yet which is ever more faintly perceived - - - as if phantoms were flickering into their final oblivion over the cosy hearth of their dying memories, as the storm of change rages outside. This sense is a sure sign of the future's totalitarian intolerance of the past, and it's radical aversion to it. In an age of relentless global progress many delicate survivals will be vaporised by the great air-brush of history, and it will be as if they and their antediluvian world never were.

The survival of the Young chiefly depends upon the extinction of the Old: therefore such revenants must be impatiently and summarily swept away - for this is the hygiene of an era of Pandemics that sweeps away all the baffling contradictions of contrary old ways, so that the New World can pretend to it's own brief authority over the same fundamentally unruly Nature. Hence the impatience of many with what they see as a morbid interest in old dead things, like sentimentalised kittens and the frail passions of a powerless past; hence also humanity's equally morbid haste to assimilate itself to the indifferent future that is being brought upon us all.

The cat is dead; long live the cat.

Made in the sixties but with a distinctly thirties feel (except that in the thirties it would have taken place in a house the size of Blenheim). 'B' movie workhorse Montgomery Tully was still working in black & white and thirty shillings was still a substantial sum of money when this diverting little potboiler with a predominately female cast was dashed off (it even includes a very rare film appearance by the sorely missed Joan Sanderson).

No prizes for guessing who the prime candidate for the rat poison one of the characters buys is.