The Cat’s-Paw (1934) - film review

Ezekiel Cobb is a young American who has spent the last twenty years living in China with his missionary parents.  Hoping to carry on his father’s good work, Ezekiel agrees to return to his home town, Stockport, to find a suitable American woman to marry.  Ezekiel’s arrival in the United States coincides with the death of the friend he was to stay with, Dr Junius P. Withers.  He unwittingly falls in with Jake Mayo, a political organiser who is tasked with ensuring that the crooked businessman Ed Morgan wins the forthcoming mayoral election.  Withers was to have been the reform party candidate standing against Morgan, but with him out of the frame Mayo persuades Ezekiel to take his place.   Mayo believes the election will be a walkover for Morgan and is therefore stupefied when Ezekiel wins the mayoralty.  Realising that gangsterism and corruption are rife in Stockport, Ezekiel decides to use the opportunity that Fate has granted him to clean up the town.  His opponents soon discover that he is not the mild-mannered sap they had mistaken him for...

It has often been remarked that Harold Lloyd’s sound pictures lacked the genius and ambition of his earlier silent films.  Of course, by the time sound came along Lloyd was no longer a young man; the insane stunts that he had been able to perform in his youth were not easily surpassed by someone who was now comfortably into middle age.  Another difficulty was that the primitive sound recording equipment of the early 1930s placed enormous limitations on what could be achieved.  When Lloyd came to make Cat’s-Paw, his fourth sound film, he had virtually mastered the new medium and was back at the height of his game.

Cat’s-Paw is Harold Lloyd’s most earnest attempt at a political satire.  In the decade that preceded the making of this film, political corruption and organised crime were pretty well endemic across the United States.  Much of what the film pokes fun at – rigged elections, fraudulent acquisition of building contracts, ineffective policing, etc – were a sad reality of the time and audiences would have sympathised with Ezekiel Cobb’s apparently drastic solution to the problem – a short sharp shock administered by some sword-wielding Chinamen.  Whilst this is by no means the greatest of Harold Lloyd’s films, it is one of the best structured of his full-length films.  There is little of Lloyd’s familiar visual comedy but plenty of humour to be found in the dialogue and blackly comedic situations.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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