The Cat's-Paw

The Cat’s-Paw
Directed by	Sam Taylor
Written by	Sam Taylor Clarence Budington Kelland (story)
Produced by	Harold Lloyd
Starring	Harold Lloyd Una Merkel George Barbier
Cinematography	Bernard W. Burton
Edited by	Alan Osbiston
Music by	Alfred Newman
Production company	The Harold Lloyd Corporation
Distributed by	Fox Film Corporation
Release date	July 30, 1934 (1934-07-30)
Running time	102 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$617,000

The Cat’s-Paw (1934) is a comedy film starring Harold Lloyd and directed by Sam Taylor. It was one of the great silent film comedian’s few sound films.

The Cat’s Paw, a novel by Clarence Budington Kelland, had appeared in the Saturday Evening Post from August 26-September 30, 1933, when Lloyd read it, and decided to buy the rights to it for $25,000.

Plot

Ezekiel Cobb, a naive young man raised by missionaries in China, is sent to the United States to seek a wife. He is promptly enlisted by the corrupt political machine of the fictional city of Stockport, led by the corrupt boss Jake Mayo (George Barbier) to run for mayor as phony "reform" politician. He is expected to be the "cat's paw" of the political machine.

Cobb unexpectedly takes his job seriously. Frequently quoting Chinese poet “Ling Po” (an apparent mispronunciation of Li Po), he embarks on a campaign to clean his town of its corrupt political machine.

Fighting back, the corrupt politicians frame Cobb. He turns the table on them, however, by enlisting the help of his friends in the local Chinese community, who help him kidnap the corrupt politicians and their hoodlum backers, detaining them in the "cellar of Tien Wang." He tells them that since his attempts to use western methods has not worked, he is going to use the methods of the ancient Chinese: either they confess or they will be executed.

They take a man into a back room – everyone says it’s a bluff, but then the man screams in terror and a moment later his decapitated body is brought out with his head set on top of his chest. When the second man is taken to the back room, it is shown that Cobb has enlisted the help of The Great Chang a famous Chinese magician on his first American tour, and that they are using his tricks to fake the executions.

This tactic works, and Mayo decides to throw his support to Cobb after all. The town is swept of its corruption and Cobb, with the support of local girl Petunia Pratt (Una Merkel), abandons plans to return to China and stays in the U.S. to fight corruption in his town. But his new wife insists on him returning to China.

Production notes

File:The Cats Paw.jpg

In an early scene, Cobb, as a young boy newly arrived in China, is given a book written by Ling Po. In the closeup of the cover, the words 靈普哲學心理論述 (A Treatise on Philosophy and Psychology by Ling Pu) are seen. However, a subsequent closeup of an open page of the book shows an excerpt from the Analects of Confucius.

Cast

• Harold Lloyd - Ezekiel Cobb
• Una Merkel - Pet Pratt
• George Barbier - Jake Mayo
• Nat Pendleton - Strozzi
• Grace Bradley - Dolores Doce
• Alan Dinehart - Mayor Ed Morgan
• Grant Mitchell - Silk Hat McGee
• E. Alyn Warren - Tien Wang (as Fred Warren)
• Warren Hymer - 'Spike' Slattery
• J. Farrell MacDonald - Shigley (as J. Farrell Macdonald)

External links

• The Cat's Paw at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films
• The Cat's-Paw at IMDb
• The Cat's-Paw at AllMovie
• "The New Pictures", Time, 1934-08-27, retrieved 2009-04-11