The Cat’s Meow

The Cat’s Meow is, sadly, a pretty dull movie. The story behind it is more interesting than the movie itself. As legend has it, Peter Bogdanovich, director of Paper Moon and What’s Up, Doc, became friends with Orson Welles when Bogdanovich was a young, up and coming director and Orson Welles was an elder statesman of Hollywood. Welles told Bogdanovich that when he was an up and coming director an (unnamed) elder statesman of Hollywood told him the true story of what really happened aboard William Randolf Hearst’s yacht in 1924. And thus, the structure of The Cat’s Meow was born. A dramatic retelling of a third hand account of an old Hollywood mystery that plays like a gossip magazine’s blind item: perhaps completely real or perhaps just rumor and innuendo.

From the very beginning of the movie we know the end result: one of the male passengers dies during a weekend excursion. The mystery is in why this person died and who might have killed him. This piece of the storytelling is actually fairly compelling.

Hearst arranged this little boat trip for a gaggle of his high powered and famous associates in business and entertainment, in honor of one of their birthdays. This all plays out like The Great Gatsby, except its only one party and all the participants are real historical figures. The Cat’s Meow doesn’t present the roaring twenties as opulently as, say, Baz Luhrman’s Gatsby adaptation, but it is a reasonably rich feast of bespoke period suits and stylish period dresses all dancing to tin pan alley records up and down the art deco halls of the famous publishing tycoon’s yacht.

I think how much you enjoy this aspect of the film will unfortunately depend on how well you know the setting. For those that know nothing, it will likely be a surprisingly bland take on the frivolities of the rich and powerful of the era. For those that are more familiar with the history, there is some extra spice. The movie tells you Hearst is an important man, but if you know the period you know just how powerful he was. Charlie Chaplin is obviously a successful actor, and an icon few have never heard of, but if you know his personal history, the references to his philandering take on an extra meaning. Leaning on this meta-narrative is fairly hacky but it does its job: it provides useful context for the yacht’s inhabitants, and their relationships, beyond Charlston dancing and smoking marijuana-laced cigarettes.

This party atmosphere, which would grow tired quickly on its own, is buoyed by the intrigue surrounding the dramatic irony that one of these people is going to die very soon. This little interplay between the developing tensions and motivations on the boat that might lead to someone dying, contrasted with the theoretically lighthearted nature of a weekend-long party, as well as the snide comments and underhanded wheeling and dealing that go hand in hand with Hollywood’s pettier players and power brokers, make something very watchable despite a somewhat pedestrian execution.

However, once the man in question dies, after about two thirds of the movie is done, my interest in the film dropped faster than stock prices did on black Tuesday. I struggled to gather an ounce of care about how the rest of the movie was going to play out. The one trick it had, the question of who died and how, was now done yet the magic show still had more than a half an hour left to go. I believe the movie wants you to move from the “who died?” mystery to the “why was no one questioned about it?” mystery but at that point I was checked out. Given the level of wealth and power on the boat, especially Hearst himself, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why it was all swept under the rug.

This leaves the film to limp to its eventual and inevitable conclusion, ending with its best attempt at half-hearted poignancy about the true cost of a frivolous life like the ones these rich artists, businessmen, and socialites were living. Others may find meaning in the film’s concluding shots and final words, but they found no purchase with me.

Would Recommend: If you love the look and sounds of the 1920s, especially those associated with silent era Hollywood royalty.

Would Not Recommend: If you are hoping for some kind of resonant message to lie beneath the glorified Hollywood gossip and art deco aesthetics.