Directed by: Jerry Thorpe

This review contains a severe Kitty Carnage Warning!

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

Synopsis: Journalist Bill Fenner (Robert Vaughn) encounters intrigue in Venice when he tries to uncover the story behind a suicide bombing during an international peace meeting.

Featured Feline: Late in the film Fenner is captured by a bad guy named Robert Wahl (Karl Boehm). He is led into a laboratory-type room where a black cat is inside a glass enclosure.

Wahl has one of his men place a white rat in the glass tank with the cat. The cat kills the rat (not shown on screen).

Then the cat is removed (by forcefully being scruffed, we might add!) and is given an injection (the cat isn’t really being injected).

Kitty Carnage Warning! The cat is placed back in the tank. This time when a rat is placed inside with the cat, the cat starts going crazy with fear, running about the container trying to escape. This is supposed to demonstrate to Fenner how Wahl can use the injection to force him into a state of submission.

It is a totally unpleasant scene to watch. What is even more disturbing is the cat actor is clearly distressed. We could not find any information about how this scene was filmed or how the cat was made to react like this. One could make the argument that the cat screeches could have been dubbed in and the action not as extreme as it seems. But it is clear the cat actor’s ears are back, the cat is distressed and desperately trying to get out of the enclosure for whatever reason (being poked from below? Mild electric shock? A dog revealed beneath?) Plus the screeches appear to match the actions and mouth movements of the cat, which is usually not the case when sounds are dubbed in.

Final Mewsings: The only thing cats have to fear are directors who force them to “act” scared.

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