Starring: Pinkie and Pal
Directed by: Victor Schertzinger
This review contains a Kitty Carnage Warning!
Cat Out of the Bag Alert! This review contains some spoilers for this film!
Synopsis: New York bandleader Terry Rooney (James Cagney) goes to Hollywood for a screen test but has no clue how successful he actually becomes.
Kitty Cameos (with slight Kitty Carnage Warning!): After finishing a film and thinking he has made a bust of his career, Terry runs away with his new wife Rita (Evelyn Daw). They don’t tell anyone where they are going and board a tramp steamer for their honeymoon trip. While on the ship, Terry announces a boxing match between two cats.
Terry refers to the two boxing cats as “Brown Boy” and “White Boy.” The cats are fitted with boxing gloves and refereed by a man dressed as a cook.
The cats “box” until Brown Boy goes down and White Boy is declared the winner.
This was a rare film appearance by Arthur Nelson and his boxing cats (Nelson is the man refereeing the match). The popular novelty act was far from the only boxing cat act of its day, a form of entertainment which thankfully has gone the way of many animal acts. Nelson and his cats appeared in several newsreels and even a clip of the act was shown in the documentary It’s Showtime.
In August 1937 articles in various newspapers (likely excerpts from promotional materials provided to the press by the studio) wrote about the cats alongside articles about Cagney:
The big attraction on the set where James Cagney is making “Something to Sing About” is not the star, but a pair of boxing cats, that will be used in the picture.
Their trainer, a man named Nelson, puts on a special bout for us when we visit the set.
Nelson never starts training a cat until it is a year old. The pair he uses in his present act are four and three years old.
He ties little gloves on their front feet and sits them on stools in a small ring. Then he rings a bell.
The cats, a big brown and smaller white, come out into the ring on their hind feet and start giving each other rights and lefts. It is amazing the swiftness of their blows. They get mad, too, yowling and hissing. Occasionally, they forget the Marquess of Queensbury rules and slip in a bite.
By the end of the fourth round, Cagney is rehearsing unnoticed and everybody is gathered around the cats.
But the applause of the audience doesn’t mean a thing to these feline entertainers.
As soon as the show is over, they crawl into their boxes and calmly fall asleep.
Other articles around the same time (yet another press release, no doubt) assured movie-goers that the boxing cats were approved by the S.P.C.A. These articles, one of which refers to Arthur Nelson as an expert feline psychologist and a member of the S.P.C.A. of Atlantic City, N.J., say Nelson “invited a representative of the Los Angeles society to see the unique spectacle of a boxing match between two educated alley cats.” The article does not state specifically what the representative might have had to say about the whole affair, but does say that the cats evidently enjoyed the whole set-to, inferring that they were given the go ahead by the Society.
We will take a look at the history of boxing cats in a Special Feature coming soon.
Final Mewsings: Cats should be encouraged NOT to fight!
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