A Young Woman Comes Of Age - As A Train Robber

Well, I said I might talk about Cat Ballou, so here we are.

I'm generally lukewarm on Jane Fonda, but, as Homer Simpson said, Lee Marvin's always drunk and violent, so that's good. Fonda is the title character, a young woman returning home after completing her studies as at a lady's finishing school. Unfortunately, her father's farm is in danger from a British railroad magnate, who naturally has an ace gunman, Tim Strawn (played by Marvin as a menacing figure in black with a false metal nose). Cat has the aid of her father's lone farmhand, Jackson Two-Bears, and eventually two low-rent rustlers, Clay and Jed, she met on the ride out. Jed was posing as a priest to rescue Clay from a marshal. None of them are going to be a match for Strawn. So she sends for Kid Shelleen, who is hailed as a great gunfighter in all the dime store novels. Unfortunately, just as in Unforgiven, the dime store stories aren't all that accurate, and Shelleen (also played by Marvin), is so drunk he can barely stay on his horse.

Although the fact he can ride the horse sideways repeatedly tells you how good he'd be if he was sober.

Soon enough, Strawn kills Cat's father, in plain view of her and all the guys. Cat gives chase, and follows him back to a saloon in town, where the Tycho Brahe imitator calmly sits in a chair outside. Then he states he's been there all day, and the crooked sheriff backs him up on it. So Cat buries her father, and turns to crime, with the four men backing her up with varying degrees of reluctance. Shelleen gradually sobers himself up, albeit because he thinks he and Cat have a future as a couple (they don't). Cat eventually gets her revenge on the railroad magnate, but is swiftly captured and sentenced to be hung. Which is actually where the movie starts, with Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye singing to us of the ballad of Cat Ballou while they strum banjos, and await her execution*. Those two actually show up throughout the film, and they usually have guitars slung on their backs, so I expected them to bust those out at some point, but no. I suppose banjos fit the tone of the movie better.

That was actually one of the things that confused me about the movie. It feels very much like a comedy, between the balladeers tongue-in-cheek lyrics, to the drunk gunfighter, to the two wannabe crooks. I suppose it is a comedy, but all the stuff about her father being murdered in broad daylight, and the law doing nothing because the railroad's bought it, that made me think things were going to get serious. Contrary to what Mel Brooks said about comedy and tragedy, other people's misfortune ain't always funny, you know? So the circumstances of Cat's turn to crime threw me for a bit, but it's a funny movie.

I was a little surprised Lee Marvin won an Oscar for his role. I think because when Robert Osborne was describing that, he gave me the impression it was because Marvin did the old "play twin brothers" thing, and I didn't feel like Strawn got enough dialogue or character work for that to really mean much. Marvin does a good job with Shelleen, though. He's a real wreck of a drunk. There's no anger to him, like Mitchum's character in El Dorado, just an exhausted resignation. Things have changed, he may not be needed any longer, and that's something he hasn't adjusted to yet. He finds someone who needs him - Cat - and starts trying to pull himself together. But then you worry if he's going to fall apart when he learns what he thought was happening between he and Cat, isn't there. So he has to find something else. I don't know who else was in the running for that Oscar, but I'd say Marvin was a solid choice.

Also, just look his clothes when he decides to challenge Strawn once and for all. That is the most stylin' guy I've seen in a movie since Kevin Bacon in X-Men: First Class. He even had a horse they trained to lean drunkenly against a wall. That's pretty cool (and apparently they were able to train it in an hour, with judicious application of apples).

And Cat's a pretty effective criminal leader. She knows when to use guilt trips, or cajoling. She knows when they need gentle prodding, or a supportive word. She knows when to just go do things herself. It was her idea to hire Kid Shelleen, and to take on Clay and Jed. Her father didn't really see the point, although he wound up dead, and his daughter wound up a fugitive, so from his perspective, none of that stuff actually helped. But eventually it paid off! Cat just needed a little time to find her stride (and to realize what kind of a game she was in).

* There were also a host of ladies outside the jail with signs, probably the standard League of Decency old biddies you see in a lot of Westerns trying to stamp out immorality. If I had to put up with their squawking outside my (barred) window, I'd probably ask for the execution to be expedited.