The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing ** (1973, Burt Reynolds, Sarah Miles, Lee J Cobb, Jack Warden, George Hamilton, Bo Hopkins) – Classic Movie Review 7,569

Alas the 1973 film The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing offers no cat dancing, thus disappointing cat lovers everywhere. Burt Reynolds stars in this strange Western in which everyone seems either searching for, or escaping from, somebody else.

Alas director Richard C Sarafian’s 1973 Western The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing offers no cat dancing, thus disappointing cat lovers everywhere.

Instead, the title refers to Burt Reynolds’s character Jay Grobart’s squaw wife, one of the causes of friction in this strangely half-baked Western in which everyone seems either searching for, or escaping from, somebody else.

Sarah Miles’s character Catherine Crocker, for example, is running from her abusive husband Willard Crocker (George Hamilton) and takes up riding with outlaws. They are Jay Grobart, who leads Dawes (Jack Warden), Billy Bowen (Bo Hopkins) and the Indian Charlie Bent (Jay Varela) in robbing a train of $100,000. Escaping, they take along Catherine Crocker.

Eleanor Perry’s unfocused screenplay (based on Marilyn Durham’s debut novel) and Sarafian’s meandering direction never tie their wanderings together, though the wide-open spaces look stunning, thanks to Harry Stradling Jr’s photography, and screen partners Reynolds and Miles earn points for oddness. Lee J Cobb is an asset as the pursuing detective Harvey Lapchance, and the good cast also includes Jack Warden, Bo Hopkins, Robert Donner and Jay Silverheels.

Also in the cast are Sandy Kevin, Nancy Malone, Owen Bush, Larry Littlebird, Larry Finley and Sutero Garcia Jr.

Sarafian also made the equally peculiar but much more successful Vanishing Point, the odd 1970 British thriller Fragment of Fear, as well as the 1971 Western film Man in the Wilderness.

Clint Eastwood attended the premiere, but he and Reynolds did not work together till the ill-fated 1984 City Heat.

Eleanor Perry said the novel was ‘female fantasizing, but what else was Wuthering Heights?’ She described the film as ‘the first woman’s-lib Western with very little of the murderous violence we’ve seen in Westerns lately.’

Perry took the novel to producer Martin Poll, who bought it and they agreed to produce together with Perry writing the screenplay. But Perry said much of her script was rewritten. Poll said Sarafin, MGM and he were dissatisfied with the script and hired William Norton to work on it before shooting. He said Perry was offered the chance to collaborate with Norton, but she declined. The rape scene in the novel that Perry removed from the screenplay was reinstated by the director and producer. Norton tried to claim a script credit, but the Writers Guild of America awarded Perry sole credit.

Reynolds said he did the movie ‘because I loved the book. I’d never done a love story either.’ Later, he said of the film: ‘It’s not as good as the book,’

Shooting took place  in Bryce Canyon National Park, Kanab, the St George–Hurricane area, Zion, Virgin River and Silver Reef in Utah, as well as Gila Bend and Old Tucson, Arizona.

During the filming in Arizona, Sarah Miles’s personal assistant David Whiting was found dead under mysterious circumstances in her hotel room at Gila Bend, on February 11, 1973, aged 26.

Marilyn Durham

Marilyn Durham was an Evansville, Indiana, housewife, who in January 1970 started writing, wanting to pay off the 25-year-old mortgage on her widowed mother’s home. She sought to write ‘a big juicy, dirty best seller’. It became a best seller and the film rights were sold, before the novel had been published, for $50,000.

She wrote two more novels. She died on March 19, 2015, aged 84, in Evansville.

The cast

The cast are Burt Reynolds as Jay Grobart, Sarah Miles as Catherine Crocker, Lee J Cobb as Harvey Lapchance, Jack Warden as Dawes, George Hamilton as Willard Crocker, Bo Hopkins as Billy Bowen, Robert Donner as Dub, Nancy Malone as Sudie, Jay Silverheels as Chief, Jay Varela as Charlie Bent, James Hampton as Jimmy, Sandy Kevin, Owen Bush, Larry Littlebird, Larry Finley and Sutero Garcia Jr.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7,569

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