In the massive original script for *CITIZEN KANE, based on the lives of Chicago press lord Robert McCormick, Wall Street robber baron Jim Fisk and media mogul William Randolph Hearst, there was a scene concerning Kane's covered up murder of a rival for mistress Susan Alexander's favors. That scene and a number of other melodramatic elements were eliminated by Welles from the final shooting script. Only Raymond the Butler, who "knows where all the bodies are buried," remained in the finished picture. Years later, however, Welles told his young protege, Peter Bogdanovich, of similar events in the real lives of these powerful men; in particular, the puzzling death of Producer Thomas Harper Ince from indigestion or a heart attack after a weekend party on Hearst's yacht, The Oneida, in November 1924. Welles and Bogdanovich both agreed, "it would make a helluva movie," in itself.

Peter Bogdanovich's THE CAT'S MEOW is that movie.

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The handsome Ince, forgotten now but for the disputed details of his death, was a pioneer giant of the motion pictures. By age 30, he had appeared as an actor on Broadway, in vaudeville, and in movies. Then, in 1910, he turned to directing, and Carl Laemmle put him under contract to what would become Universal Pictures, making movies in Cuba (to avoid the avaricious eye of Edison's Motion Pictures Patent Company).

Two years later, Ince was in California for Universal, where he bought property in Santa Monica, which became known for a time as "Inceville." On this land, he invented or adapted many of the devices and methods of studio motion picture production. Insisting on script and shooting schedules, he marked outdoor locations, constructed facade sets easily made over for any occasion, shot several movies at once, used multiple scene set ups, delegated less important scenes to assistants, and hired directors like Frank Borzage, Jack Conway and Henry King, who would make the standard Hollywood product for the next three decades or more. In the following 12 years, Ince produced 132 movies, directed over 60 himself, and attached himself as presenter or supervisor to 150 more. Ince was known for his Westerns, and especially for hiring William S. Hart, the greatest Silent Cowboy of them all.

An inveterate deal maker, Ince was a factor in the founding or growth of studios like those of Universal, Mack Sennett, D. W. Griffiths, MGM, United Artists and Paramount. With his 1915 anti-war epic, CIVILIZATION, he moved increasingly toward big personal productions, some of which were successful financially, and some of which were not. But when he took the train down to San Diego to celebrate his 42nd birthday, a party already in progress aboard Hearst's Oneida, he was still very much a force and influence in Hollywood.

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Based on a play by Steven Poros, Bogdanovich's THE CAT'S MEOW -- the jazzy title perhaps suggested by a 1924 Mack Sennett comedy -- follows fairly closely the known facts. [To take one exception, it was Chaplin's secretary who claimed to see the incriminating evidence, not his chauffeur as in the film -- the figure who would become Raymond the Butler in . . . KANE.] The film begins with documentary footage and reconstructed newsreels of Ince's funeral. Our narrator is Elinor Glyn (Joanna Lumley), one of the most successful popular novelists of the 20th Century. [She wrote 39 books; 12 of them were made into movies. Her first novel filmed, THREE WEEKS (1914), had sold five million copies. She also discovered Rudolph Valentino and named Clara Bow, "The It Girl."] With epigramatical finesse, Elinor introduces the characters and comments on the scene, in a long flashback.

On board the Oneida, awaiting the married Thomas Ince (Cary Ewles), is Margaret Livingston (Claudia Harrison), who is being kept under wraps. Ince is mixing business with adultery, for he wants to go into business with W. R. Hearst, who maintains a studio on the MGM lot. Hearst (Edward Herrmann), at 61, is more interested, through the use of various peep holes and microphones, in keeping his eye and ear on his own 27 year-old mistress, Marion Davies (Kirsten Dunst). He becomes particularly perturbed when Charlie Chaplin (Eddie Izzard) is effusively greeted by Marion.

Also coming on board, besides Miss Glyn, are the very upright Barhams (Ingrid Lacey and John C. Vennema), two party girls, Didi and Celia (Claudie Blakley and Chiara Schoras), and an obscure 41 year-old New York Hearst columnist named Louella Parsons (Jennifer Tilley), who is visiting Hollywood for the first time. Other retainers, crew members and hangers-on wander the passageways and decks of the Oneida.

THE CAT'S MEOW takes place in approximately 24 hours: The boarding, the settling in, dinner and the birthday party, late night events, and the morning after. During that time, we witness Ince's desperation, Hearst's jealously, Marion's energetic sense of fun and Chaplin's lust. The plot involves a discarded letter Chaplin foolishly writes but does not give to Marion, which is plucked out of a waste basket by Ince and utilized to coerce Hearst.

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Observations have been made by critics of the resemblances between GOSFORD PARK and THE CAT'S MEOW. Indeed, Claudie Blakley, Didi here, played Mrs. Jack Nesbit in the former film. Both movies are mysteries, set long ago, among secretly troubled autocrats. Both suggest the power of wealth and class in their respective nations. Both have long set-ups for the crime. CAT'S MEOW, however, is very different in quality, style and tone from GOSFORD PARK.

Director Bogdanovich, rather, invokes mild homages to the films of Welles, who inspired the project. For instance, we have the newsreel to exposit the story, as in CITIZEN KANE. Hearst, though different in temperament from Kane, does tear up Marion's stateroom searching for something. On another front, Ewles' Ince resembles Welles's player Michael Mac Liammoir acting as Iago to Hearst's Othello. In fact, there is a low angle tracking shot, while Ince attempts to fan the old man's suspicions, in which the light casts shadows from an overhead grate on the faces of the two as they move toward the camera -- very much like a famous scene in Welles' OTHELLO (1955). Elwes, of course, played John Houseman in Tim Robbins' CRADLE WILL ROCK (1999). For that matter, Jennifer Tilley took the Agnes Moorehead part of Aunt Fanny in the recent cable re-make of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS.

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Eddie Izzard, the former standup comedian, gives a fine performance as Chaplin, conveying the ease and arrogance of a man who knows that he is a genius, and that anything which he wants should be his. Funnily enough, he does not resemble Chaplin at the time at all. He is too big, too florid. The man Izzard does resemble is Chaplin's later friend and collaborator, Orson Welles, as he looked in the early 1940's. [Was it a Freudian slip, or a typo on the copy, that my Film Society hotline invitation to CAT'S MEOW said the film's action took place in "November 1942"?]

Alas, Bogdanovich is not the director Welles was, nor does he have the flawless cast that Altman had in GOSFORD PARK. For instance, Elwes seems ill at ease in his part as we meet him, and Tilly, though she is more effective in her later scenes, presents her typically gushy performance, with little of the deadly edge Parsons must have had.

Some critics have not been kind to Kirsten Dunst, 18 when she made THE CAT'S MEOW, but I thought that she caught much of the irreverent, sunny charm attributed to the 27 year-old Davies. And I agree with most critics that Edward Herrmann turns in one of his finest performances as Hearst. He has the desperate bonhommie of an ungainly host. Nobles oblige, amusement, doubt, hurt, love, rage, and cold efficiency fly across his face. Here is a host who enjoys entertaining his guests with a performer who catches a cannon ball fired into his gut. Here is an imperious titan who shows distainful hatred for sea gulls by awkwardly potting them off with a pistol from his quarter deck (just as he sicked his papers on Latinos, Asians and Blacks, much of his life). Like the man who admired Hitler in the 1930's and, in his last days, Joseph McCarthy, Herrmann as Hearst can decisively make wrong decisions, but Herrmann's Hearst is also embarrassingly in love with and dependent upon his Marion.

The one who appears to have the most fun in the film is Joanna Lumley (TV's ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS), who steals every scene she is in. The former model wears Miss Glyn's elaborate costumes superbly, and in a braided auburn wig and with dark lips and green eyes against what seems a quarter inch of ghostly white face powder, she conveys the aristocratic power which so impressed Hollywood. (She was a Sutherland, and her sister was a lingerie designer who married Lord Cosmo Duff-Gordon and survived the sinking of the Titanic, giving Elinor an additional cachet by association in Tinseltown.) With her plummy, melifluous voice, Lumley's Miss Glyn delivers the kind of lines which "inflamed a nation." [e.g., "A madness of tender caressing seized her. She purred as a tiger might have while she undulated like a snake." -- The heroine in Three Weeks (1907), attempting to arrouse her spent lover.] Lumley, unlike Tilly, is never quite too much.

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Now, biographers and historians tend to dismiss this telling of the story, but as Miss Glyn and the film point out: Why did the morning LA papers report someone had been shot on Hearst's yacht? Why was that story gone in the afternoon editions? How was it that the dead man was said to have died in three different places? From several different conditions?

Then, there is the strange question of how Louella Parson almost immediately signed a lifetime contract with Hearst and became perhaps the most powerful woman in Hollyood for the next thirty years? When the reluctoant San Diego DA was finally forced by public opinion to make a formal investigation, what possessed him to call only one witness, a passenger on the yacht, a Doctor Daniel Carson Goodman (James Laurenson in the film)?

[Is that the same Daniel Carson Goodman ( or a relative) who also wrote and produced movies for years?]

Most of these matters may be attributed to shock and confusion after the event, but it is puzzling that no one on the Oneida that night, except for Dr. Goodman, could ever after be persuaded to give an account of the events, indeed to say anything at all. [And could there be a Hearst-Chaplin-Welles connection in all of this secrecy?]

As I say, once the hidden events of that November night in 1924 are well underway, THE CAT'S MEOW becomes quite enthralling, even moving; it stimulates a touch of ironic wonder.

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Peter Bogdanovich has garnered some surprisingly good reviews for his direction of this film. Granting that he made THE CAT'S MEOW in Berlin and on location in Greece, funded by one of those "generous" Lion Gate Films budgets, I hope the reviews spur a major outfit to give him another chance to exercise his talents.

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*CITIZEN KANE --

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Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older