The Best Movie Ever | Cats

Cats. You love ’em, we love ’em, Hollywood seems a teensy bit ambivalent. Because for every decent cat movie out there, there seems to be a few dozen movies in which a dog is either a gallant hero or a badass villain. Down with dogs! Up with cats! In the middle with rodents! But we digress…

Keanu is, if nothing else, a damn good cat movie. It’s a film about the absurd lengths to which people will go for the sake of their cat, in which comedians Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele are forced to impersonate deadly drug cartel assassins in order to save their kitten, “Keanu,” from the clutches of a dangerous gang. Maybe – just maybe – it’s one of the best cat movies ever made. But what is THE best cat movie ever made?

Also: Kitten Around with Key and Peele (Exclusive Sleepy Kitten Video!)

As usual, we asked our panel of film critics – Crave’s William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold, and Collider’s Brian Formo – to each make their case for just one movie. And as usual they came at the topic from different directions, selecting a Japanese horror movie, a classic film noir and a wholly irresponsible wildlife thriller as their prime examples of cat movies at their best.

Find out what they picked and why, and come back every Wednesday for all-new, highly debatable installments of Crave’s The Best Movie Ever!

Witney Seibold’s Pick: Kuroneko (1968)

Kindai Eiga Kyokai

Cats, cinematically, often get the short end of the stick. In films, cats are most often depicted as aloof at best, and sinister at worst. Cats are most frequently seen as inscrutable, evil schemers who will show you affection for as long as it takes them to eat you alive. Dogs, meanwhile, are the loving, adorable carriers of halcyon childhood memories. Oh sure, you have attack dog movies like Cujo and Man’s Best Friend, but those are meant to be topsy-turvy inversions of what we feel about dogs. Cats, meanwhile, get movies like Cat People, Sleepwalkers, The Black Cat, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, Cat’s Eye, Cats & Dogs, Cinderella, Babe, and so many other depictions of their outright untrustworthiness. If a cat is to be friendly, then they can’t be portrayed by an actual cat. They have to be animated (I’m very fond of an obscure animated film called Cats Don’t Dance). 

But as long as that villainy proves to be a constant, we may as well acknowledge the best of that trend. The scariest cat-related film I have seen is probably Kaneto Shindo’s 1968 horror film Kuroneko, a dark and moody ghost story set around the Rashomon gate, made famous to American audiences by Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film. In Kuroneko, a pair of Japanese women are raped and murdered in a bamboo grove by a passing bandit. A cat witnesses. When they are dead, the cat somehow falls into a ghostly kinship with their spirits, allowing the women to return as vengeful spirits who lure passing samurai back to a ghost mansion where they are torn apart as if from cats. Complication arise when a passing samurai, questing to destroy the spirits, turns out to be the husband of one of the women, and son of the other.

Shindo, a prolific Japanese director, also directed Onibaba, one of the best films of the 1960s, is a master of atmosphere and slow dread. Kuroneko takes place in a dimmed world of whispering plants and supernatural vengeance. The wrath of the ghostly cat women has become a part of the landscape, and may serve as a cultural vengeance for all women wronged by men. But, despite the horrors of the movie, there is still a note of tempting compassion lurking under everything. It’s scary, yes, but also very, very sad. 

Brian Formo’s Pick: The Long Goodbye (1973)

United Artists

Before I get into a gushy discussion of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, lemme just say that Elliott Gould (who plays Raymond Chandler’s most iconic character, private detective Phillip Marlowe) fully sees the cat as integral to the picture, despite a limited appearance. On the DVD featurette “Rip Von Marlowe” Gould says that he sees the point of the film as being that people are as fickle as a cat. Now, I don’t see cats as fickle, just that you do have to consistently show them that you love them but also respect their space. I respect that.

The Long Goodbye opens with a glorious tracking shot of Marlowe getting some shut eye, being awoken by his hungry cat, and going to the kitchen to feed it. The rascal looks at his bowl of food, and—totally unsatisfied—continues to meow to let him know that he’s not actually interested in that same old shit (spice it up, my man!). Marlowe exits his apartment to go to the supermarket for some new cat food, and he encounters nude yoga neighbors on their balcony who want some brownie mix from the grocery store, too. Marlowe slumbers past both cat and woman, but heeds their requests. At the store, they don’t have the brand his discerning kitty likes and the nearest employee tells Marlowe that all the cat food tastes the same. Marlowe’s response, “You don’t have a cat.” The shopkeep’s response? “What do I need a cat for? I got a girl.” Marlowe mumbles, “He’s got a girl, I got a cat.”

The cat is our introduction to Marlowe. It wakes him from his dream. Altman says the dream was of Chandler’s tough guy noir and the film business of yore. This Marlowe wakes up 30 years later, in a bizarre spot where lounging beauties are now active yoga beauties who can be independent of men. Where birds don’t dictate things, cats do. And where people want lesser things from a detective: not, get me some pictures of a cheating husband, but get me some brownie mix, and some goddamn delicious cat food!

William Bibbiani’s Pick: Roar (1981)

Drafthouse Films

There are a lot of cat movies that I like – The Adventures of Milo and Otis, The Three Lives of Thomasina, Cat People, Cat’s Eye – but only one that I think my cat would actually like. The 1981 thriller Roar is one of the most terrifying films ever produced, and not for the reasons I think the filmmakers intended. The films stars real-life spouses Tippi Hedren (who previously had a problem with The Birds) and Noel Marshall (who wrote and directed), and it takes place at a wild cat preserve where the people freely mingle with over one hundred jungle cats, most of whom have not been tamed and who sometimes attack the actors in the middle of a scene for no reason other than they are giant murder monsters.

Noel Marshall has to leave the preserve at the beginning of the film, not knowing that his family (including real-life daughter Melanie Griffith, who was mauled during the production – yes, really) was arriving early, and headed straight for a confrontation with free-roaming predator demons. What follows is hard to explain, not because it’s confusing – the hapless family is assaulted by lions, in real life and on-screen – but rather because it’s hard to tell whether Roar thinks the incident is funny or frightening. Are we supposed to be amused that these ignoramuses don’t know that the cats are only playing, or are we supposed to be horrified that these furry carnivores are about to kill all these fleshy meatbags without even trying hard?

Roar took 11 years to produce, for a variety of reasons. Melanie Griffith almost lost an eye, and all told over 70 crew members were injured on the set, including future Speed director Jan De Bont who, in his position as cinematographer, was scalped by a lion and then proceeded to return to work after he receiving 220 stitches. There is no other film that so disturbingly captures mankind’s collective obsession with cats. We insist to all the world that they are the cutest little things, but they don’t care if we live or die so long as the food flows freely, and wouldn’t you know it? We are all made up of food.

Previously on The Best Movie Ever:

Top Photos: Drafthouse Films / United Artists / Kindai Eiga Kyokai