It’s because of the cat that Holly Martins (and the audience) finally realises that his old friend Harry Lime is not really dead. We’ve first seen the tabby-and-white kitten a couple of scenes back, refusing to respond to Martins’ playful attentions. ‘Not very sociable, is he,’ observes Martins. ‘He only liked Harry,’ says Lime’s girlfriend Anna, by way of explanation. But of course, it’s not just an explanation, it’s Chekhov’s gun. So, in one of the most fun and satisfying reveals in movies, when we see the kitty purring, mewing and rubbing itself up against a man’s shoes as he shelters in a doorway, we know who it is before the light goes on.

The cat appears only briefly, his master’s herald, and, like a witch and her familiar, the two are linked. Harry Lime displays certain catlike traits; he’s stealthy, cunning. elusive but also charming, cheeky and playful. ‘Not very sociable’ is an observation that be applied to Lime, who spends much of the film in hiding, off screen, as much as to his cat. The protagonist to his antagonist is Holly Martins and martins, of course, are birds, prey and playthings for cats.

Harry Backhouse
Cat eaten by shark – The Dove

Kids never really watch anything by accident any more, do they? I mean, with all the dedicated channels and the youtubes and the netflixes and the electric interwebs and that. Today’s kids will never be stuck in a living room on a rainy Sunday afternoon with only three / four / five (delete according to the exact level of your clips’n’cunts style nostalgia) channels to choose from, and with two of those showing horse racing. So they’ll never have to sit through The Dove and have the scene where the cat gets eaten by the shark seared into their memory for ever.

I spent literally ten minutes searching for the name of that film, and that is a digital eternity. I began to question whether it really existed; after all, the only bit I could remember was that a cat got eaten by a shark. According to the IMDB the film tells the story of a young man’s attempt to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe in a boat called The Dove. Along the way he meets a girl and yadda yadda yadda. I never said it was good. In fact, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. It might be responsible for my adult disdain for people that do that sort of thing – I might be the only Englishman alive to shout ‘get a job!’ whenever Ellen Macarthur appears on TV, for example.

Anyway, the sailor-boy has a cat with him. It sleeps in the loose, hammocky bit of the sail when the wind is low, and at one point the mast swings round and throws the cat into the sea, where, despite gamely swimming towards the calling sailor-boy, it is eaten by a passing shark. I’ve forgotten the rest of the film entirely, but the shark-cat interface sticks with me. I can still summon up the memory of its little face moving towards the boat as the menacing fin slices through the water behind it, and the blonde sailor yells in increasingly desperate tones. God, I wanted that cat to be OK.

I’ve forgotten hundreds, probably thousands of films, in my time, many of them bona fide classics. I once had the unlikely experience of realizing, halfway through Resnais’ L’annee derniere a Marienbad that I’d seen it before. Truly, my memory is spectacularly awful. Had Resnais included a scene where a tiger ate a guinea pig, possibly in a hedge maze, then I have no doubt it would have stuck more tenaciously in my mind.

Emma Street
Angus – Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging

Angus is the half Scottish wildcat / half bad-tempered domestic mog who belongs to snogging and thong- fixated teenager, Georgia Nicholson.

In the transition from book to film, poor Angus rather loses out. He doesn’t get nearly as much of a starring role in Gurinder Chadha’s film as he does in the original stories by Louise Rennison. He fares better than poor (human) Dave the Laugh though.  Ah, Tommy Bastow. If only they’d carried on making the films, he could have been Georgia’s happily ever after. As it is he has to be content with ‘The other one from those annoying BT adverts’ as the most significant thing on his acting CV.

A few significant bits of Angus-related bits of plot remain. Georgia and the object of her affection, Robbie, bond over their shared love of cats and Georgia devises a scheme in which she stages Angus’s disappearance and conspires to have Robbie find him. It doesn’t quite work out that way because Angus, a spitting, mad bad-arse of a cat, is not about to be told what to do.

Throughout the film we see Angus hanging out with Georgia’s little sister, Libby, usually sporting some kind of outfit – cowboy outfit, baby clothes,  wedding dress – that sort of thing.  ‘Stop putting Angus in drag!’ admonishes an exasperated Georgia.

When Georgia is lying on her bed sobbing in the midst of heartbreak and best friend problems, Angus is by her side. Anyone who has ever owned a cat and ever been a teenage girl can probably relate. The cats of adolescent girls everywhere get very used to being used as tear-soaked pillows at times of crisis.

Angus may not have been the most significant character in the film, but does have an honour that rarely gets bestowed on film cats. That of having his name is right there at the beginning of the film title. Is there a film called Jonesy and the Alien? Or Mr Bigglesworth and the Spy Who Shagged me? No, there isn’t. Angus wins.

Fiona Pleasance
Ulysses – Inside Llewyn Davis

A couple of months ago, when I was talking about film editing with my students, I asked if anyone had seen Inside Llewyn Davis.  After a pause, one hesitantly raised his hand.  ‘Was that the one with the cat?’

Why yes, it was the one with the cat, or actually two cats, possibly even three.  Rarely has a cat been so visible in a recent movie, placed front and centre in the poster and the publicity material in all its ginger glory.  The human Llewyn may be the title character, but the story of his bad week is intricately linked with those of his feline co-star(s).

The first thing we see at the beginning of the flashback which forms the bulk of the film is the back end of the Gorfein’s cat as he walks down their corridor, leading the camera, and us, to Llewyn, who has crashed in their spare room.  It is Llewyn’s accidentally letting the cat out of the Gorfein’s apparment which kicks off the action.  Llewyn doesn’t really know cats; if he did, he would just leave the animal where it is, close to home, and let the cat take care of the rest.  As it is, he decides to take the animal with him.  Bad move.

Llewyn’s problems in general are cristallized in his treatment of his feline co-stars.  He screws up, repeatedly.  In terms of the cats, he lets one escape twice, kidnaps the second, fails to let this one out of a car at an opportune moment, and hits either the second or a completely different cat with a car.  All the time, Llewyn keeps trying to put things right, but his decision-making vis à vis felines – and in general – is constantly hampered by his sense of well-meaning but utterly misplaced responsibility.  He doesn’t know that cats are generally resilient enough to be left to their own devices.  He doesn’t see that, by trying to put things right, he’s actually making them worse.  Llewyn has to learn to let go, and nowhere is this made clearer to him than in his dealings with cats.

The moment when Llewyn hits a cat with car he’s driving forms a key point in the film.  For once, faced by an difficult turn of events, he can’t actually do anything, even the wrong thing.  In the dark and driving snow, unable to find or reach the animal that he has injured, he is forced to watch it limp off into the bushes and take care of itself.  He returns to New York to find that the Gorfein’s cat, the one he thought he had lost, has also taken care of itself and returned home, quite without his help.

There is even an case to be made that the film’s central ‘journey’ is not Llewyn’s but the one Ulysses (as we finally learn the Gorfein’s cat is called) undertakes. The film itself points to this, obliquely, when Llewyn sees a poster for the Disney movie The Incredible Journey – an anachronism, as the film itself wasn’t released until two years after the events of Llewyn Davis take place (so presumably it must have been important to the filmmakers to include it).  And of course the cat’s name refers not only to the ultimate wanderer but also to another Coen Brothers character, Ulysses Everett McGill from O Brother Where Art Thou?.

As for Llewyn Davis, after the worst week of his life – at any rate, let’s hope they don’t come much worse – at least he proves that he has learned not to let the cat out.

In the Making Of for the movie, the Ethan Coen explains with a big smile: ‘The cat was a nightmare.  The cat trainer warned us, and she was right, she said: “Dogs like to please you, the cat only likes to please itself.”  A cat basically is impossible to train.  We have a lot of footage of cats doing things we don’t want them to do, if anyone’s interested.  I don’t know if there’s a market for that….’  A market for cat-based media on the Internet….?  Go for it, Ethan, set up a youtube channel and get the financing for a couple of movies.  But maybe put a dog in the next one.