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.

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.

I watched this film expecting it to be dull and boring but it held my interest right through to the end. It was made at Twickenham Film Studios and they did not go far for the external scenes as the Police station shown is Twickham police station. I think the young actor playing the shop boy also had minor singing career. For a low budget film it is in my opinion worth watching.

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.

A deliciously old-fashioned murder mystery ,with a threesome of mischievous old ladies who find it hard to make ends meet (a problem which is still relevant today when old people whose pension is too meager have to resort to charity organisations )but whose pride is intact and who would never,in a month of sundays ,accept any hand-out.

Their landlords was a generous man who did not force them to settle the arrears on their rent;but he's just passed away and his widow is a tartar , who treats her stepdaughter like Cinderella and ruthlessly raises her old tenants' rent.Her cruelty knows no bounds :she goes as far as to kill the cute kitten , adored by her mistress,one of the grannies, and everyone.

When the hateful woman (Vanda Godsell is incredibly wicked ) dies ,the viewer heaves a sigh of relief ,but the movie becomes a whodunit : he suspects the old ladies, the jeweler (who is also the stepdaughter's uncle) ,the young girl ,her boyfriend....all have motives,in the grand tradition of Agatha Christie.Although not to be mentioned in the same breath as the queen of crime's works, the screenplay is well written ,and acting is very good.