Starring: Dinah

Directed by: Joseph H. Lewis

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

Synopsis: Terry Ramsey (Terry Moore) believes her Uncle Willie (James Gleason) has been reincarnated into a racehorse named October.

Featured Feline: Uncle Willie owns an unnamed long-haired tabby cat which he often carries with him, even when his horse is running a time test on the race track.

Later the cat jumps down from a tree to Uncle Willie’s shoulder. The cat accompanies Uncle Willie and Terry into the stables.

Terry is distraight when Uncle Willie dies suddenly. She holds the cat at his funeral.

The two leave the funeral together.

Terry is sent to her Aunt Martha (May Whitty), a rich woman with few friends but several greedy related hangers-on. Terry brings the cat upstairs when she meets Aunt Martha. The woman tells Terry to “get rid of that animal.” Terry protests but Aunt Martha insists.

Fortunately Terry doesn’t get rid of the cat and when she goes outside later she calls, “Here kitty kitty!” The cat jumps down out of a tree into her arms (or is catapulted into her arms at least). Sadly Terry just says she’ll see the cat later and drops it to one side.

The cat only appears one more time, jumping onto the back of the race horse which Terry thinks is her Uncle Willie, deepening her belief in this theory.

Behind the Scenes

As reported in the February 27, 1949 issue of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Sun, director Joseph H. Lewis started the search for the cat actor almost a year before filming began. Inevitably the animal trainers he approached would say they didn’t train cats. One went so far as to say, “Nobody trains cats.” But history was made when Lewis contacted Frank Inn, a trainer then working for the Rennie Renfew Kennels. Lewis told Inn that he needed a cat “who will leap on a man’s shoulder and stay there. It must keep its claws in. When we toss it through the air, it must stay where it lands. It can’t have bad table manners, because it may have to join Glenn Ford and Terry Moore at dinner (no such scene occurs in the film). And it has to stay in Miss Moore’s lap or in Jimmy Gleason’s arms without scrambling.”

Inn’s response? “How high does this cat have to count?”

Reportedly Inn was not familiar with training cats for acting at this time. His neighbor’s pet cat had given birth to a litter of ten kittens, so Inn picked the handsomest of the lot and named the kitten Dinah. He would then realize the kitten was actually a male, but the name Dinah would stay. (Note: most other articles at the time say that Dinah was adopted from a pound).

Frank Inn set about training Dinah to jump on a shoulder on cue by tempting the cat with a bit of liver (salmon was too smelly). At first this only worked when Dinah was hungry, but soon he learned to jump on cue without the treat. This would become a mainstay trick of Frank Inn’s future cat stars, including Orangey.

The next job was to familiarize Dinah with a Hollywood film set. On one trip to the studio, Dinah jumped onto the back of a Great Dane who played a minor role in the movie. Unfortunately Dinah unsheathed his claws, causing the poor dog to howl and leap over the back fence with Dinah still clinging to his back. Dinah returned right after but the Dane was missing for three days. It’s hard to say whether this really happened or if it just one of those fanciful stories cooked up by the studio’s publicity machine.

While this particular article makes no mention of Dinah having a team, as most cat actors do, photos and other articles tell another story. Several pictures of Terry Moore holding a number of similar tabby cats, including Dinah, would make it clear numerous cats were used to play the one part. One caption claims the other cats are Dinah’s relatives, which would indicate Inn worked with more than one kitten from the neighbor’s litter. A later article stated that when the technicolor lights were too bright on the set, one of Dinah’s eight stand-ins would take over. A November 9, 1947 article in The Knoxville Journal stated that Dinah had ten stand-ins. Inn explained that he rotated the cats to keep them from getting bored and restless and used different kind of food in relays. “I begin with horsemeat and when they get tired of that I switch to hamburger. I use fish as a last resort. If a cat won’t do a trick for a bit of fish, you might as well take it out of the scene. It’s through for the day.”

Another photo shows Dinah posing with Terry Moore and Glenn Ford along with some canaries and a German Shepherd (a staging of a trick which Dinah was known for).

By October 1947 an article in The Bend Bulletin out of Bend, Oregon, indicated that Dinah’s worth shot up to $75,000. Supposedly Harry Cohn, the President of Columbia Pictures, was so impressed with Dinah’s talents he negotiated a $50,000 insurance policy on the cat actor’s health. The article went on to say that Dinah collected $55 a day for leaping, clawing, riding, etc. Inn also reportedly sold stockholder shares of Dinah at $10 a pop to Glenn Ford, Evelyn Keyes and Red Skelton as well as Columbia directors, producers, photographers, prop men and technicians. The same article stated that Dinah would only eat American wienies and Portugese sardines.

We can find no reference of Dinah appearing in any films after this one which he was trained specifically for, but it’s interesting to note that this appears to be the beginning of Frank Inn’s specialty of training notable cat actors.

Final Mewsings: Notable cat actors deserve bigger roles!

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