Director – John Gilling, Screenplay – George Baxt, Producer – Jon Penington, Photography (b&w) – Arthur Grant, Music – Mikis Theodorakis, Special Effects – Les Bowie, Makeup – Roy Ashton, Production Design – Bernard Robinson. Production Company – B.H.P. Films.
Cast
Barbara Shelley (Elizabeth Venable), Andre Morell (Walter Venable), Conrad Phillips (Michael Latimer), Richard Warner (Edgar Venable), William Lucas (Jacob Venable), Andrew Crawford (Andrew), Freda Jackson (Clara), Alan Wheatley (Inspector Rowles), Vanda Godsell (Louise Venable), Catherine Lacey (Ella Venable)
Plot
Walter Venable and his servants murder his wife Ella and bury the body in the grounds of the estate. Afterwards, Walter becomes obsessed with finding and killing Ella’s cat Tabitha. As the police investigate Ella’s disappearance, her niece Elizabeth comes to stay, along with several other relatives. Elizabeth notices that Walter and the others seem more obsessed with locating the cat than they do with Ella’s disappearance. They are also afraid of the cat and believe that it is stalking them. However, the cat is uncannily aware of their abilities to trap and kill it. Elizabeth and investigating detective Michael Latimer believe that Walter killed Ella to get her will and control of the estate. They are certain that the other relatives are trying to find the real will that is hidden somewhere in the grounds rather than the one that Walter is passing off and claiming leaves everything to him. Soon the cat starts to become the cause of a series of accidents that kill off the members of the family.
John Gilling (1912-84) was one of the minor directors of the Anglo-Horror cycle of the 1950s-70s that was created by the success of Hammer Films. Gilling had been directing since the 1940s and made two classic works for Hammer films with The Plague of the Zombies (1966) and The Reptile (1966), among other works of the period. (See below for John Gilling’s other genre films).
The Shadow of the Cat is an interesting oddity. It was clearly made after the Hammer horror boom had begun. It shoots at Bray Studios that was Hammer’s home until 1966 and features a good many of the personnel that were part of the early Hammer era – production designer Bernard Robinson, makeup man Roy Ashton, special effects whiz Les Bowie and cinematographer Arthur Grant, along with regular Hammer actress Barbara Shelley. It has a plot that in other circumstances could quite easily have been told contemporarily but has been backdated to the Victorian era that was favoured by most of the Hammer films. There are a number of sources that identify The Shadow of the Catas a Hammer film, although the company name does not appear on the credits – the exact story as to what the case is remains a mystery.
In many other ways, The Shadow of the Cat does not belong in the Anglo-horror cycle at all. It is one of the few ventures into supernatural (ghostly) horror that was made in the Anglo-horror period 1957-1976 – the ghost story or haunted house film was one of the horror themes that Hammer and their many imitators never touched. Equally, in terms of style, The Shadow of the Cat belongs to the earlier era of the quota quickie (the legislation in existence between the 1930s and 190s that required British distributors to turn out twenty percent British-made product, which resulted in a good many cheaply made films attempting to exploit this) – it is in black-and-white for one, something that Hammer abandoned after 1957 (apart from several 1960s psycho-thrillers). Visually, the tone that John Gilling adopts is the same dreary plodding and unexceptional style of other horror films to emerge out of the quota quickie era such as House of Darkness (1947) and Ghost Ship (1952), at its best Ealing’s classic anthology Dead of Night (1945).
Barbara Shelley
As with the latter-day Anglo-horror wannabe The Uncanny (1977), the idea of a horror film centred around cats is not particularly scary to anybody who is not a ailuorphobe. The Shadow of the Cat was compared by others, notably David Pirie in his seminal genre study A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946-1972 (1973), to the Val Lewton classic Cat People (1942) with its heroine who may or not be able to transform into a cat being. (There is also the tendency to confuse The Shadow of the Cat with the earlier Anglo-horror film Cat Girl (1957), which more closely resembles Cat People and also starred Barbara Shelley as the heroine). The plot of the wife murdered and the cat stalking people at times suggests something of Edgar Allan Poe’s oft-filmed The Black Cat (1843).
John Gilling does create some of Cat People’s subtle ambiguities – the entire film is carefully ambiguous about the nature of the cat and whether it enacts supernatural justice. However, John Gilling’s unexceptional handling is worlds away from the haunted atmosphere of Cat People. The cat-related work that The Shadow of the Cat resembles more than anything is The Cat and the Canary (1927), an Old Dark House classic about relatives attempting to kill the heroine and one another around a big, dark old mansion in order to get their hands on an inheritance. In terms of mood, pacing and its unexceptional, pedestrian visual style, it feels more like The Shadow of the Cat is a film that was being made during the era of 1940s psychological thrillers than it does the dynamic, full colour in your face horrors that were premiered by Hammer.
