Cat’s Eye (1985, Dir. Lewis Teague)
Synopsis:
A stray tabby cat has a series of adventures, whilst traveling across the U.S., in a film partly based on the short stories of Stephen King.
Regular readers of this blog will know by now that I’m a huge Stephen King fan — as if that wasn’t already obvious from the fact that I’ve created an entire album of music based on the most evil locations in his work, I’ve also looked at a number of films based on his books which were hugely influential to me as a teenager who wanted to write fiction.
I’ve always had a certain amount of affection for this unusual little film, based on an original screenplay by King, but using two of his previously published short stories, Quitter’s Inc and The Ledge as source material for 2 of the 3 stories featured here, which are all joined together by cat that is involved in each of them. Though it’s now probably one of the more forgotten King adaptations of the 80s, it did quite well upon its initial release and was regularly shown on U.K. Tv later, which is where I first saw it. The fact that I’ve always loved cats probably helped in making me want see it…
It’s also a film with more in jokes and nods to King’s other works, either literary or cinematic than any other, making it an amusing watch for fans of his work. From the opening featuring a Cujo lookalike and a red Plymouth, with a bumper sticker saying she’s called “Christine”, to the fact that several characters are reading Stephen King novels or they have a tv on showing a film based. on one of his books, culminating in the brilliant moment of James Woods’ character switching off the TV in disgust and saying: “Who writes this crap?” Perhaps, this is one of the reasons I love it so much — regular readers of King’s work know how fond he is of self references, something that few of the movies and tv shows, with the exception of the recent J.J.Abrams produced Castle Rock (which is based on King’s fictional town, though not directly inspired by any of his novels), have managed to do.
It’s a portmanteau film and like all such films some of the stories are more interesting than others. Some of the critics, such as Gene Siskel, felt The Ledge segment let the film’s energy sag a little too much — though personally I’d disagree. I actually think the final segment, General, is the most problematic, because its tone shifts from the macabre thriller style of the first two segments into something more like a fairy tale. It’s also not helped by the fact that King had initially planned a much more elaborate opening, better setting up the idea of the cat hunting the troll as it tries to steal the breath of little children. In this opening, we would have had Drew Barrymore again playing another little girl, who this time is killed by the troll, hence the cat’s quest to find it and also the now rather nonsensical scenes of the ghostly vision of Barrymore appearing to the cat during the film. Whilst these additions might have only made slightly more sense to what, when you analyze it, is still a rather silly premise; they would have made the tone of the film a little more even.
Ultimately, as with all King’s work, if you’re watching or reading it whilst questioning its realism then it’s not doing its job properly. King’s work has always been about grounding the fantastical in enough reality that you don’t notice the cracks. That, to me, is his great genius and also why the small town milieu of much of his work is so important. In translating the world of his books to film, what’s needed is performances from actors who know how to imbue larger than life characters with depth and feeling and directors with enough visual flair to keep the audience on the edge of their seats and there’s more than enough of that here.
In Quitters Inc. there’s fantastic performances from both James Woods and Alan King. At the time this was being filmed, Woods had already made a name for himself as one of the most brilliant screen actors of his generation, but King was better known as a comedian. He’s both menacing and darkly comic here, and it’s easy to see why he became so sort after to play gangsters later on in his career. Woods draws on the same nervous and volatile energy that his character in Videodrome had. He can be both cowardly and aggressive, but even when his anger rises to surface you can still see the fear underneath, something that always made his performances so compelling. To be honest, without these two amazing performances, this segment wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. As it is, the combination of Woods’ manic energy and King’s velvet-gloved sadism makes your palms sweat throughout.
In The Ledge, there’s good a performance from Robert Hays — who plays the nice but too trusting Johnny Norris well. He’s perhaps a little too much of a ‘goody two shoes’ to really convince as the tennis pro having an affair with a dangerous man’s wife, but it may also be that I can’t completely shake the memory of him in Airplane and (as with his co-star in that film, Leslie Nielsen) I find it a little hard to accept him in a dramatic role since then. However, his performance here nicely balances the superbly over the top evil of Kenneth McMillan’s character. McMillan is always fantastic to watch and here he pretty much steals the segment, going from charming to maniacal and finally cowardly and whiny when the tables are turned on him at the end.
The stand out performance in General is really Cindy Clark as the mum — who veers beautifully between sympathetic and slightly tyrannical in a very believable way. Drew Barrymore had matured quite a bit since her roles in E.T. and Firestarter and, freed from the responsibility of having to carry the entire film almost by herself, is much more nuanced here. She has small cameos as other little girls throughout the film, the James Woods character’s daughter for instance, but her role in this section gives her the most amount of screentime and her work here is. easily up there with that in E.T.
However, the film’s true star is the tabby cat (or presumably cats, as the production must have needed more than one) whose presence links the various sections and is required to display an extraordinary level of interaction with its human co-stars. I’m struggling to think of another film, where a cat was required to do so much in terms of “acting” — I think you’d need to go back to Disney’s The Cat From Outer Space to find another film that featured one so heavily. Now, of course, they’d probably use CGI if the film was made today, but there’s something about the brilliance of how they managed to not only capture the cat doing all it needed to for the story as well as imbuing it with a definite character, just using live animals and the occasional special effect that is still really impressive.
There’s some serious talent behind the camera too. The film’s cinematographer was Jack Cardiff — yes, the same Jack Cardiff who also photographed The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus! So the film’s visual style is well above average compared to some of King’s other screen adaptations.
The score is by Alan Silvestri, who had already done Romancing The Stone at this point and would graduate to the A-list of Hollywood composers with his score to Back To The Future in the same year as this. His score here is quite different though. Largely electronic, it was composed and produced entirely using a Synclavier and, if you can track down a copy, is well worth a listen, particularly for fans of recent synthwave horror scores such as Stranger Things.
This was director Lewis Teague’s second King adaptation after Cujo, and whilst that was a perfectly decent film of one of King’s less interesting novels, I think his work here has more scope and is far more interesting due to the multi character nature of the film. Each of the segments has its own visual style and mood, and there’s loads of great visual flourishes — from James Woods’ character hallucinating about everyone else smoking when he’s quit, to the slo motion shots of the cat racing to safety across a busy street and the troll’s POV shots, there’s a lot of great ideas here, so it’s a shame that after helming this and the Romancing The Stone sequel, The Jewel Of The Nile, Teague’s career seemed to falter and he’s wasn’t given any bigger budget films to helm.
If you’ve never seen it, or it’s been a while since you last saw it (somehow it never seems to turn up on TV like it used to) — then it might be time to revisit this enjoyable and, in some ways, more faithful attempt to capture the essence of King’s fiction on screen. 8 out of 10 cats, who expressed a preference, said it was a pretty good movie.
