When I talk to people younger than myself about Westerns, the first name they generally mention is “Clint Eastwood.” What they might not know is that the movies Clint made were not Hollywood Westerns. He did TV Westerns, sure, but his movies were post-Western. The Spaghetti Western was a foreign after blow, a reaction to the death of the American Western film.
Buy Cat Ballou Blu-rayThat genre was born (effectively, but we ain’t doing a college course here) with Stagecoach in 1939. And it became one of the major powerhouses of American culture for years. The American Western was a giant cultural touchstone. Think Marvel movies in the mid-’10s, but with fewer other distractions, like video games and the whole internet.
But nothing lasts forever. Just as Marvel movies have seen their apogee and are zenithing in both monetary and cultural terms, the Western waned. And when a beloved genre goes to seed, what grows are satires and parodies.
Cat Ballou (1965) was (according to the marketing material) a “sleeper hit of its year.” It’s largely a satire on Westerns. It begins with Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye singing “The Ballad of Cat Ballou,” singing about the female outlaw soon to be brought to justice at the gallows.
The real story is about how a schoolteacher, Catherine (Jane Fonda), comes home after incidentally helping a criminal escape justice, and finds her father is on the wrong side of not the law, but politics. The local government wants his land for development purposes, and he doesn’t want to give it up.
They take action, he ends up dead, and Cat ends up the demi-leader of a crew of misfits fighting against the man. It includes the wastrel she met on the train, his uncle, an Indian her father had hired, and a wildly useless drunk, Kid Shelleen, one of a dual role by Lee Marvin. He also plays Tim Strawn, the hired gunfighter who murders Cat’s dad.
This dual role earned Lee Marvin an Oscar, and his character has the most life in a movie that… while not limp, has some limpness upon it. Cat Ballou has a serious story and a comic tone. That can work if both story elements are sharp. But I would say about one in three jokes lands, and the serious aspects contrast too heavily with the comedy to work as decent drama.
The film is completely episodic. There’s the innocent girl on the train scene. Then the returning to the farm scene. Then the dance that ends in a brawl scene. They’re not unrelated, but do not flow into one another seamlessly. Hell, the ultimate villain of the film is introduced in completely comic scenes, and we don’t know who he is until nearly an hour later. It’s not a dramatic surprise, it’s an annoyance.
What works in this movie, of which I’m not overly fond, are some of the performances. Jane Fonda’s Cat hits the right notes of an untamed girl pretending to be tame, until circumstances push her over the edge. And Lee Marvin is masterful, if unsubtle, in his role as a complete drunk who is still a master gunfighter.
Cat Ballou uses the tropes and the expectations of a Western largely to make fun of them. It’s a movie for the end of a film cycle. And that’s fine, though I prefer sincere films to limp satire. Because it’s not all that funny, and the more heartfelt aspects work better than the jokes. This is where the American Western largely ended. Thankfully, the Spaghetti Western emerged to reinvigorate the genre in a whole new context, for a short time.
But Cat Ballou was part of the end-cycle of the American Western. It had a political angle (vaguely feminist.) It made fun of the genre as much as it exploited it. And it had that ’60s movie sense of humor where chaos takes the place of, you know, actual jokes. Maybe somebody likes that, I don’t. I like the Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye Greek chorus. I like Lee Marvin winning an Oscar, though this is not nearly his best performance. His Oscar acceptance speech was more amusing than this film is.
Cat Ballou has been released on Blu-ray by Columbia Pictures. Extras include a pair of commentaries: one by actors Michael Callan and Dwayne Hickman, and one by film historians Eddy Friedfeld, Lee Pfeiffer, and Paul Scrabo. There is also a short archival featurette, “The Legend of Cat Ballou” (13 min).
