There’s always a great movie on tv, many times buried deep within the schedules. RICHARD LUTZ finds one this week you can’t ignore
In some films things go right, and the movie is so right, you just don’y see the joins.
And that’s the case with Cat Ballou (Thurs; Film4, 12,55pm).
This 1965 cowboy satire has Jane Fonda as the eponymous Cat Ballou, alone in the violent west, needing a gunslinger to save her ranch and avenge her father’s murder.
She crowbars ex -sharpshooter Kid Shelleen (Lee Marvin) from the barroom and gives him the mythological last chance. The man he has to face- evil Tim Strawn bedecked with a fake silver nose and played by no one else but….Lee Marvin.
Tough guy Marvin, best known for heavyweight material such as Point Blank and Dirty Dozen, won an Oscar for the dual role. He is funny, drunk and likeable as the pisshead turned good (even his horse is blottoed and stands cross legged) and downright nasty as the man The Kid has to kill to save the day.
By the way, both Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster were in the running, at one time or another, for this juicy double role. But Marvin was just the man to pull it off.
Anyway, does The Kid rise from his sea of rotgut whisky to be re-born to save the day? Well, it is done for laughs so you can expect what results.
There’s great locations in Wyoming, a banjo twanging theme song sweetly sung by Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye and even a brief charactor appearance by a certain Butch Cassidy, a figure to be immortalised five years later by Paul Newman.
Fonda is charmingly naive and somehow exudes both innocence and a tough inner core as the woman out for justice with the help of the town drunk. It kicked off her A- list career and allowed her to escape the shadow of a stern disapproving real life father, Henry Fonda.
Cat Ballou is afternoon viewing so you might want to hit the record button.
But if it’s rainy and you have the day off, what better way to wile away an afternoon.
Or, what worse way to wile away your time than the worst film of the week: The Ruins (BBC1, Fri, 11.155pm): tourists explore Mayan ruins in Mexico and are chased all over the place by carnivorous plants. Now, here’s a good reason to sequester Hollywood cash to build more schools, better hospitals and a better world.
