The Black Cat (1966)

Starring: Pluto

Directed by: Harold Hoffman

This review contains a severe Kitty Carnage Warnings!

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

Synopsis: Based on the short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Lou (Robert Frost) is an unbalanced young writer who becomes completely unglued, in part because of a black cat.

Featured Feline: Lou and his girlfriend Diana (Robyn Baker) are celebrating their anniversary and she gives him a black cat as a present. He decides to name the cat Pluto after the Roman god of the underworld.

The Black Cat - close up of black cat Pluto

The Black Cat - black cat Pluto held by Lou Robert Frost

Instead of staying and celebrating with Diana, Lou takes Pluto to meet his bizarre menagerie which includes a monkey, a raccoon and a bird. Lou drunkenly pours champagne into their cages. Why exactly he has these animals is not made clear.

The Black Cat - black cat Pluto held by Lou Robert Frost looking at bird cage

The Black Cat - black cat Pluto held by Lou Robert Frost looking at bird cage animated gif

Diana can’t help but notice how obsessed Lou is with Pluto. The maid Lillian (Sadie French) warns Diana that Lou has become downright mean.

The Black Cat - black cat Pluto held by Lou Robert Frost while dancing animated gif

The Black Cat - black cat Pluto being hugged by Lou Robert Frost

The Black Cat - black cat Pluto held by Lou Robert Frost on lawn animated gif

The Black Cat - black cat Pluto petted by Lou Robert Frost

Returning home drunk from a night at the club, Lou is rough with Diana. After she leaves the house with Lillian, Lou seeks affection from Pluto, but the cat also spurns him.

The Black Cat - black cat Pluto on carpet

The Black Cat - black cat Pluto running away from Lou Robert Frost animated gif

Kitty Carnage Warning! Cornering the cat, Lou approaches the cat with a knife. Pluto fights back but Lou manages to cut out the poor cat’s eye.

The Black Cat - black cat Pluto hissing at Lou Robert Frost

When Pluto is next shown, his eye is messed up. It would appear some kind of putty or substance was placed over the cat actor’s eye to achieve this effect.

The Black Cat - black cat Pluto with messed up eye

Kitty Carnage Warning! Lou keeps thinking about the cat, convinced Pluto is a reincarnation of his father. In a later scene he uses an electrical cord to hang the cat, plugging the wire in to electrocute the poor kitty as well. This also sets his mansion on fire and results in Lou being committed to an insane asylum.

The Black Cat - black cat Pluto being hung and electrocuted

When Lou is released, he returns to Diana and they move into a smaller home. He goes out drinking and on the way home he finds a black cat on a fountain.

Diana is thrilled with the new kitty and comments on how much he looks like Pluto, even to the point of having a bad right eye. Lou had not noticed this and he suddenly reacts violently to the new cat.

The Black Cat - black cat Pluto held by Diana Robyn Baker with Lou Robert Frost

The Black Cat - black cat Pluto held by Diana Robyn Baker

Lou wakes up from a nightmare, convinced the cat was looking down on him while he slept. He grows more aggravated with the cat as time passes.

The Black Cat - black cat with shaved eye looking down and scaring Lou Robert Frost animated gif

The Black Cat - black cat with shaved eye on couch

One day Diana and Lou head for the cellar. The cat follows and accidentally causes Lou to trip and fall down the stairs.

The Black Cat - black cat between Lou's legs

The Black Cat - black cat Pluto tripping Lou Robert Frost on stairs in front of a shocked Diana Robyn Baker animated gif

Enraged, Lou picks up an axe and goes for the cat but Diana stops him. He then kills Diana with a blow to the head.

Lou bricks Diana’s body into the wall of the cellar and then looks for the cat, but he can’t find him anywhere. The police show up, having heard Diana is missing, and ask to look around. In the cellar they hear a cat meowing behind the wall and break it down, revealing the cat on top of Diana’s split head.

The Black Cat - black cat with shaved eye close up

The Black Cat - black cat sitting on the dead Diana's head

Despite some meandering of scenes (including long segments in which Lou sits in the bar listening to a band play several songs) this is a fairly faithful adaptation of Poe’s story.

The cat actor gets an opening introductory credit as Pluto, although this is the name of the character in the original Poe story and not necessarily the cat actor’s real name. Because the film was low budget, chances are only one cat actor was employed, meaning the same cat likely played both Pluto and his predecessor. The second cat with the bad right eye actually just has fur missing from around that eye. There’s no real reason for this, unless the substance put over the cat’s eye earlier in the film resulted in this strange lack of fur or the fur around the eye needing to be shaved off? Without much background information on this low budget film, we can’t say if this was the case, but it seems the only logical explanation.

An interesting sidenote: This film was classified as restricted, which meant that people 18 years or under were not to be admitted. A British Columbia creation to alert moviegoers to this fact was the Restricted Cougar, a symbol of adult fare back in the day. One of the introductions included film of kittens playing with yarn, and this was likely shown before a screening of this movie.