The Black Cat (1966) (2024)

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.

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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.

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The Black Cat (1966) (4)

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.

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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.

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The Black Cat (1966) (11)

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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The Black Cat (1966) (22)

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Black Cat (1966) (28)

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.

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Final Mewsings: Black cats are not scary; it’s what people do to them that is!

Relevant Links:

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The Black Cat (1966) (2024)

FAQs

What are the essential questions of The Black Cat? ›

Essential Questions for “The Black Cat”

How can guilt manifest itself in the world around us? Is perverseness an essential quality of human nature? Can a person ever get away with a truly evil act, or are they always found out somehow? How do great writers create a mood that readers can feel?

What is the overall message of The Black Cat? ›

The storyline in "The Black Cat" effectively shows the obscurity in every human being. This story shows how every individual has the potential for ethical significance, and inscrutable immorality. The equilibrium of these forces can vary among every person, but the presence is true.

Does the narrator go to jail in The Black Cat? ›

It takes place over the course of a few months. ''The Black Cat'' setting starts in the protagonist's jail cell where he is awaiting his execution the following day. He then takes the readers on a journey back to his old house. The first part of the story, where Pluto features, is set primarily in the narrator's house.

Did the narrator in The Black Cat feel guilty? ›

The narrator is consumed with guilt and paranoia, fueled by his alcoholism he acts erratically and gives into rage and violence.

What does The Black Cat story symbolize? ›

The cat symbolizes the narrator's guilt in "The Black Cat." The narrator kills the first cat in a drunken rage. The second cat that resembles his murdered fist cat acts a tormenting reminder of the narrator's wrongdoing in the abuse of animals.

Why did he hang the cat in The Black Cat? ›

The narrator starts off loving animals and his wife, but unfortunately turns to alcohol and starts abusing his wife and animals, sparing only a black cat: Pluto. One night in a fit of rage, he gauges out Pluto's eyeball. Horrified with his action, he hangs Pluto to prove that he is really a terrible person.

Why does he finally hang Pluto? ›

What are the reasons the narrator gives for hanging Pluto? The narrator hanged the cat because he was crazy and he said he did it because the loved the cat and because the cat never did anything to him.

Why does the narrator cut out Pluto's eye? ›

After a night of heavy drinking, he believes that Pluto is avoiding him and seizes the cat, only to suffer a bite on his hand. Enraged, he gouges out one of the cat's eyes.

What happened at the end of The Black Cat? ›

The story ends when the police find the dead body of the man's wife, with the cat on her head. On the one hand it's outrageous, and even funny. At the same time, when we think about just how close these details can come to our own reality, it's sad and frightening. There is always some bizarre tragedy in the news.

What did the narrator do to his wife in The Black Cat? ›

The wife of the narrator of "The Black Cat," she shares his love of animals and fills their house with pets. Though she sticks by the narrator despite his abuse and murder of Pluto, their cat, the narrator ultimately kills her after she stops him from kill the second black cat that mysteriously appears in their life.

What does fiend intemperance mean? ›

Alcoholism: The plot is primarily propelled by the protagonist's vice, alcoholism or, as he calls, it “the Fiend Intemperance.” This fiend divides the character's soul in two, and so he takes on an increasingly divided nature as the story goes on.

What did the narrator do with the body in The Black Cat? ›

The narrator eventually decides to take advantage of the damp walls in the basement and entomb the body behind their plaster. Without any difficulty, the narrator creates a tomb in the plaster wall, thereby hiding the body and all traces of his murder.

Was the second cat real in The Black Cat? ›

The second cat is a fiction: a predictable, indeed necessary, lie that follows directly from the narrator's previous lie.

Where does the husband put his dead wife in The Black Cat? ›

Nearing the end of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat," the story's narrator, in an attempt to kill his second cat, murders his wife when she tries to stop him. Wishing to avoid having his crime detected, he decides to inter her body within the cellar wall, expecting no one to ever find it.

Is the narrator in The Black Cat an alcoholic? ›

The events that unfolded in Edgar Allen Poe's, “The black Cat,” are all due to one person, the narrator. It is because of his Mental state, being an alcoholic, and being abusive to his wife and pets that the fault lies heavily on the narrator.

Why did the narrator go to jail in The Black Cat? ›

In the very first paragraph of the story, the first- person narrator says, “But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburden my soul.” He knows that he is going to die tomorrow for the crime of killing his wife, and so it would only make sense that he is in jail, awaiting his execution.

What happens to the narrator the night he kills the cat? ›

That night, after the cruel deed was executed, his house burned to the ground. Being a rational and analytical person, the narrator refuses to see a connection between his perverse atrocity of killing the cat and the disaster that consumed his house.

What happened to the narrator the night he killed the cat? ›

What happens on the same night that the narrator kills Pluto? His house burns.

What's the real reason the narrator is caught and convicted in The Black Cat? ›

Final answer:

The narrator in 'The Black Cat' is caught not because of the second cat itself, but because this cat was accidentally walled up with the body of his murdered wife. In his arrogance, he reveals this to the police himself.

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