Walt Disney Does "Experiment in Terror" and "From Dusk Til Dawn" -- A Little Scary

I should open by noting that I do mean here that WALT Disney is responsible for the "edge" to That Darn Cat of 1965.

"Uncle Walt" passed away only a year after "That Darn Cat" was released. The movie was released in 1965, Walt died of cancer rather rapidly in 1966 after smoking got him at age 65.

But Walt personally supervised his movies almost up until death -- with some projects started by him finished by others.

I note this because "That Darn Cat" has, again, a decided "edge" to it, principally, though the "good guy" cast includes such Disney stalwarts as Dean Jones(in his first Disney film) and Hayley Mills(in her last Disney film FOR Walt)..the "bad guy" cast includes the decidedly rough looking Neville Brand and pre-Ridder Frank Gorshin being very threatening indeed.

Brand and Gorshin play bank robbers holed up in a Los Angeles boarding house with a hostage -- a female bank teller -- to whom they make threats early and often that if she "tries anything" -- they will kill her -- AND that most likely, they will have to kill her anyway. (Which they eventually move to do.) The writing is such that these bad guys pretty much put death on the table for the hostage from the get go: its just a matter of when, they imply.

This is because "That Darn Cat" is from a book called "Undercover Cat" by a husband-and-wife crime novel writing team named "The Gordons" for PR purposes, but were fully named Gordon Gordon(I love it) and Mildred Gordon.

Gordon Gordon had some experience with the FBI as an agent, and so the two most famous books made into movies from The Gordons were "Operation Terror" (became Experiment in Terror in 1962, a pretty scary thriller directed by Blake Edwards with a chilling Henry Mancini score) and "Undercover Cat" (became That Darn Cat in 1965.)

Interesting that Walt Disney felt like making something from material as suspenseful and terrifying as Experiment in Terror had been (though certainly he toned THIS film down from THAT one -- which begins with a pretty young bank teller begin grabbed in the darkness of her house garage by a heavy breathing villain out to threaten her into a bank embezzlement.)

Both "Experiment in Terror" and "That Darn Cat" move pretty quickly to the FBI being called in (back when they were the good guys - heh -- of the J Edgar Hoover era) to work behind the scenes trying to track down the bad guys and save the terrorized female bank employees(an actual hostage in That Darn Cat, a terrorized "hostage at large under the villain's surveillance" in Experiment in Terror.)

That Darn Cat also reflects a good dose of structural suspense -- our titular cat -- given to prowling his neighborhood late at night -- stumbles into the bad guy's apartment and their hostage scratches the word "HEL" onto the cat's necklace. The cat returns to teeanger Hayley Mills and she has to convince an unbelieving FBI that this is a "clue" to the hostage situation(which has been given newspaper coverage.)

I rather liked that the suspense didn't last THAT long -- FBI agent Dean Jones has a managing agent who is willing to have a team "tail the cat" and take the possible lead seriously. Suspense returns as the manager starts to doubt the mission and call off the team.

Other cast members keep things lively -- Dorothy Provine as Hayley's older sister --marriagable but kept by a smarmy Mama's boy of a lawyer(Roddy McDowall); William Demarest and Elsa Lanchester as a warring couple caught up in the crimes (the cops accuse of Lanchester of "clearly being a man disguised as a woman); and Richard Deacon as a Drive-in movie manager(remember those?) out to keep FBI men without cars from entering.

Its all good fun except for how dangerous and murderous Neville Brand(brutish) and Frank Gorshin(weaselly) are as the bad guys. In addition to reminding me of the psycho villain(Ross Martin) in Experiment in Terror, Brand and Gorshin rather predict George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino as a murderous bank robber pair(brothers) with an endangered female bank employee in Robert Rodriguez's "From Dusk Til Dawn" (1996.) Perhaps today "That Darn Cat" has a retroactive dose of terror given what Clooney and especially QT(as a dumb, psycho sex criminal of a robber) did to that bank teller in THAT movie.

But perhaps this is a little too much. "That Darn Cat" is built for families , to entertain, with a hip Bobby Darin theme song for that hip superstar cat(I like that his activities are nocturnal -- he's a night stalker) and a happy ending in view.

Still, Uncle Walt -- a past master at endangering animal parents in Bambi and Dumbo; creator of Cruella DeVille with her plan to slaughter puppies for a Dalmation coat; and other scary villains, made sure that the bad guys in That Darn Cat kept the stakes high right up to the climax. And they were the kind of bad guys who were bad enough to merit getting blown away. But alas, only arrest...