Cat Ballou (1965)

ike a Greek chorus, the Sunrise Kid (Nat King Cole) and Sam the Shade (Stubby Kaye) croon and strum their banjos while narrating the events of the film. At the start, they preface how Catherine “Cat” Ballou (Jane Fonda) is scheduled to be hung for the killing of a man in Wolf City, Wyoming, in 1894. She’s both an angel and the devil, chronicled through a flashback that takes viewers to a time slightly before her incarceration, when she had just graduated and is on her way to becoming a schoolteacher.

On a train to Wolf City, where her father Frankie (John Marley) still resides, she’s left in the care of a preacher, but that man of god is plastered and can barely remain conscious. It’s all an act, however; the bible-thumper is Jed (Dwayne Hickman), in disguise to spring his nephew Clay Boone (Michael Callan), who is in the custody of the sheriff. In the heat of the moment, Cat aids in Clay’s escape, which is the first act of depravity that leads to her fate at the end of a rope. Once she returns to her father’s ranch, the young woman bumps into hired killer Tim Strawn (Lee Marvin), a noseless man certain to bring trouble to the Ballou household. As it turns out, the whole town is full of suspicious, corrupt people intending to drive Frankie out, which prompts the headstrong Cat to seek out a fixer unafraid of getting his hands equally as dirty: the infamous, legendary sharpshooter Kid Shelleen (also Lee Marvin).

With singing, square-dancing, roughhousing, outlaws, and gunfighters, “Cat Ballou” is a wildly uncommon, terribly unique Western, fusing the components of a musical with a comedy and an adventure and a romance – all of the lighthearted variety. Someone even gets a cake smashed in their face. It takes more than a half-hour before Shelleen is introduced, but even that is presented in a highly comical fashion – the revered gunman isn’t the tall, stately man clad in black who gallantly exits a stagecoach, but instead the filthy, raggedy, soused, crumpled figure tucked in the back of the conveyance, who falls out and must be dragged back to the Ballou ranch. “How was I supposed to know he was a drunk?”

Shelleen is the polar opposite of Shane or Will Kane or any of the other heroic Western figures to cinematically stand up to the overwhelming aversion of crooked, cowardly lawmen and murderous evildoers (perhaps lending to the more serious take on this classic revenge premise, “True Grit,” a few years later). Yet beneath the grime and tattered clothing is a righteous character just waiting to be unearthed – someone unexpectedly potent, whose formidability could never be guessed. But before he can reveal anything remarkable (a bath and shave are significantly transformative tools), and before Cat can plan her epic scheme of retribution, she’ll have to join forces with Jed, Clay, and farmhand Jackson (Tom Nardini) to become train robbers. “I’ll drink to that!”

Sticking primarily to the humor, the elements of adversity pose fleeting severity, which helps keep the mood airy. Plenty of visual gimmicks – often circling back to Cole and Kaye, who appear as various musicians in the context of the story – populate the picture as well, a few taxing the pacing, considering that so many of the characters are either solely comic relief or contribute to it. But there’s a great satisfaction in the finale, in which the ahead-of-its-time, revisionist style of the destruction of legendary feats and figures alternates with catchy tunes, pervasive optimism, and an abundance of fun. It’s truly unlike any Western before it.

– Mike Massie