Pretty Good

Absolutely the worst movie.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

What one critic (the NY Times?) called "the first CinemaScope wierdie" is indeed an oddity by 50s major studio standards, though it doesn't quite work even on its own terms. I've no idea what the novel was like, but presumably its Gothic frontier family melodrama worked better in literary than it does cinematic form. Clearly William Wellman was trying for something ambitious and different (partly perhaps a return to the grittiness of his pre-Code features), but the elements never really gel.Mitchum is well-suited to his character, who goads, bullies and belittles everyone around him, but one of the off-putting things about this movie is that he's still the nominal PROTAGONIST-he's not a villain as in "Night of the Hunter" or "Cape Fear," but our principal figure. Getting about as much screentime is Tab Hunter's little brother, but it becomes rather tedious that the whole focus of HIS character is whether he's going to let himself be completely emasculated by his guilt-tripping ma and bullying oldest sibling. (Apparently Mitchum has all the testosterone this family was allowed.) It's anyone's guess why they cast Our Gang's Alfalfa (who was in his 20s at the time) as an ancient "Injun" who speaks little yet knows all, but in any case that decision only makes the role seem more a bizarre and unconvincing contrivance. He's on the far wrong end of a cast scale that divides pretty much down the middle between theatrically melodramatic turns (Bondi, Tonge, Wright) and more effective low-key, naturalistic ones (Hunter, Hopper, Lynn). The look is striking-almost entirely "black and white in color," with stark compositions reflecting the stark rural winter setting-yet it's jarring that vivid location shooting (which Mitchum called the hardest of his career) smacks up against the obvious studio-soundstage set of the family's homestead. It's an artificial movie in ways that are interesting, yet it's actually not artificial ENOUGH to pull off this eccentrically austere (in aesthetic) yet florid (in character behaviors) enterprise on its own terms. A big, conventional, overactive orchestral score tends to work against the film's idiosyncrasies rather than supporting them. "Cat" would have probably worked better as a B&W independent feature-as admirably unusual as it is by mid-50s major studio standards, it's the stubborn residual major-studio gloss that keeps it from being as potent as it means to be. (I mean really, would an isolated 1890s Colorado ranch house be this roomy and spotless? Must all the clothes look brand new?) The result is all a little dull and uninvolving, with too much of the rather turgid infighting on the ranch for us to get caught up in Mitchum's solo quest for the killer wildcat in the mountains. I'm glad to have finally seen it, but the truth is "Cat" was considered a pretentious misfire then, and it still is one.

I saw this with a couple of other kids in a theater when it was released and remarked that it wasn't the action movie I'd been hoping for. Our resident genius replied, "Dis is what dey call a MELOdrama." That kid was absolutely right. A true mental giant, he probably went on in life to invent string theory or something.It's 1876 and the Bridges family lives way up in the mountains, deep snow heaped all over the place. A cougar has been nipping at the cattle, and now it has nipped Arthur, one of the Bridges sons, and killed him. That leaves Ma and Pa Bridges with only two sons -- arrogant but cowardly Robert Mitchum and well-meaning but submissive Tab Hunter. Pa Bridges is a burned-out drunk. Ma Bridges is a Bible-spouting virago who dominates everything. Teresa Wright is the washed-out middle-aged daughter whose life is in ruins. Diana Lynn is Tab Hunter's visiting girl friend, whom Ma doesn't like because Lynn's desperate feminity threatens Ma's domain.It's talky and unpleasant. Everybody argues with everybody else in a neat farm house with white interiors. Pa flails around, boozed up, with nothing sensible to say. Diana Lynn and, later, Wright, keep urging Tab Hunter to run off to Aspen, marry Lynn, and start his own life. He agrees but then something always kneecaps his intentions until the next time he decides to go, when something else will deter him. It's pretty dull.The one thing that can't be faulted is William Clothier's photography. There's never been anything quite like it. The screen is almost drained of color, but who needs it? Jagged dark peaks rise above vast fields of pristine snow, where there may be nothing but the tracks of a man or a cougar. The evergreens are almost everblack. And Clothier has captured tentacles of gossamer mist gradually climbing the dark crests as if the vaporous gauze itself were animate.Without those exteriors on Mount Ranier, what you've got is a poorly drawn melodrama.

Some of the location shooting in a snowy wilderness uses the then-new Cinemascope to best advantage but too much is on a, frankly, phony looking indoor set no better than something used on some TV cowboy serial. Initially, it seems to be a Western, the clothes and firearms suggest sometime between 1880 and 1900, but the humble exterior of the log cabin has an interior with finished walls and fancy furniture that could be as late as 1920 in some remote parts of The West. That aside, the plot is byzantine, with an English accented, drunken father, a crone like mother and three sons (all so different as to be adopted!!)Hopper as the eldest is bookish and gentle and apparently on a higher spiritual plane, Mitchum the next, is rough, crude and sexually suggestive to the girl loved by youngest son, Tab Hunter, whose blonde hair and perfect teeth belong on a California surfing beach. What exact purpose the old "Indian" (played by 26 year old Alfafa actor Schwitzer)has in unclear. He mostly lurks, grimaces and mumbles phrases that are supposed to be insightful, but sound like Tonto on Mogadon. It looks like a stage play but has origins on the printed page, very uneven, veering from boredom to low comedy (the drunken father's numerous hidey holes for his bottles of booze). Hopper does well with a part that suits his laid-back style but Mitchum fails to convince as the predatory, lascivious middle son.

Like that other famous film family the Corleones, the Bridges consist of three brothers and a sister all living under one roof. AFter that any resemblance just doesn't exist.The dominant one here is Robert Mitchum one brutish lout of a man, but someone who probably has held the family together on this ranch up in the mountain area of Colorado. It's wintertime and these people are trapped by the snows in their valley. They've also got a mountain lion who's feasting on their stock.William Wellman who did so fabulously by Walter Van Tilburg Clark's other novel, The Oxbow Incident, misfires with this one. It's visually stunning, the color cinematography dealing with the winter images that are black and white. The only other colors you see are the red of Mitchum's jacket and the yellow of the fire and Tab Hunter and William Hopper's hair. Oh, let's not forget the blood.Some really great images are in this film. My favorite is the scene of the funeral which is photographed looking up from the waiting grave. Who's funeral, you have to see the film to find out.I have to say though, the Bridges family after a while were just not that interesting to me. The film itself doesn't come alive. It lost money big time for Batjac productions and John Wayne and Warner Brothers. Still I'm sure that this film, failure though it was, led to Robert Mitchum being cast in much better films like Night of the Hunter, Cape Fear, and Home from the Hill.For Mitchum completists only.