Hoodoo Ann (1916)

by Mark Murton

Directed by: Lloyd Ingraham

This review contains a Kitty Carnage Warning!

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

Synopsis: Young Ann (Mae Marsh) has lived in an orphanage since infancy. Unhappy and lonely, Ann is told by the orphanage cook during a palm reading that she will be cursed until she is married. Eventually a kindly couple adopt her and she soon starts courting a neighbourhood boy. But again misfortune befalls her throwing Ann’s future happiness into doubt.

Kitty Cameo: Next door to the couple who adopt Ann live the Higgins’s, and Mrs. Higgins (Anna Hernadez) is first seen sitting on the steps outside her house fussing with a black cat in her lap, before putting it down and going inside.

Hoodoo Ann - Mrs. Higgins Anna Hernandez holding and petting black cat

Hoodoo Ann - Mrs. Higgins Anna Hernandez picking up black cat

As Ann’s romance with Jimmie (Robert Harron) blossom he takes her to the pictures to see a Western. The next day Ann finds a gun at the home and waves it around like the characters in the film she saw, but unbeknownst to her the gun is loaded and a bullet is discharged, entering the Higgins’s house. On the steps outside the house the cat is startled by the shot and runs off.

Hoodoo Ann - Ann Mae Marsh shooting gun and startling Mr. Higgins Charles Lee and black cat animated gif

Kitty Carnage Warning! After the gun goes off, Ann is dismayed to see Mr. Higgins (Charles Lee) lying on the floor. Believing she has killed him, seemingly confirmed by the discovery of blood nearby, Ann tearfully confesses to the crime and an investigation begins, complicated by the fact that Mr. Higgins’s body disappeared before anyone else saw it. The mystery is solved when Mr. Higgins returns home several days later and reveals that he had simply left town to avoid his wife’s incessant nagging (he too had been startled by the shot and, somewhat the worse for drink, had fallen to the floor). A young neighbourhood boy then arrives with the Higgins’s cat with one of its leg bandaged – apparently the shot hit the cat and this explains the blood stain found earlier.