Directed by: Stuart Cooper

Cat Out of the Bag Alert! This review contains spoilers for this film!

Synopsis: Amanda Kingsley (Loretta Young) is a wealthy, charitable older woman who finds out she has an incurable aneurism and hires a detective to track down and reunite her grown children.

Cat Cattle Call: Amanda likes to go out at night with her butler Maitland (Trevor Howard) to bring coffee and food to the homeless and to rescue stray cats. In one of the opening scenes the pair are pushing a shopping cart with three cats inside.

Cat Burglar (Scene Stealer): In the next shot, they are returning from a night’s excursion and Amanda is holding a calico kitten. The doorman asks if there is only one cat that night and Amanda says it just wasn’t their night for cats.

When they get upstairs to the penthouse Amanda is confronted by her son Andrew (Arthur Hill). “Do you really need another cat?” he asks. “No,” she laughs, hugging the kitten, “but it needs me.”

Once inside the apartment she carries the kitten into the living room where several other cats are sitting.

In a later scene Amanda’s maid, Maria (Lisa Vidal) picks up and scolds the kitten lovingly, telling her that it’s time for the kitty to go to sleep.

Maria carries the kitten to the bed and sets her down, pointing as she orders, “Okay kiddo, you go back to sleep and you don’t make no mess!”

While not directly involved with the plot, the cats are seen a couple more times in various scenes.

While Maria is cleaning the Christmas ornaments with a feather duster, the calico kitten plays among the boxes as a white cat passes behind them. This is the last time the cats are seen in the film.

Final Mewsings: We should all be so charitable to cats, and not just at Christmas time!

Many thanks to Mark Murton for letting us know about the cats in this film.

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