The big cat movie of late 2013/early 2014 is, of course, the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. To tie in with the film’s UK release, I wrote a piece for the Telegraph about ten of my favourite CATS ON FILM performances. Regular visitors to CATS ON FILM may already be familiar with these films, and the cats in them. But do you agree with my choices?
“The film doesn’t really have a plot,” Joel Coen said of Inside Llewyn Davis. “That concerned us at one point; that’s why we threw the cat in.” Coen and his brother Ethan have learnt one of the truisms of the seventh art – that there are few films that are not improved by the presence of a cat.
Here, then, are ten of my Favourite Feline Film Performances. I have deliberately excluded films in which the cat is a protagonist. But in the following examples, the cat steals scenes and has an identifiable character – even if more than one animal is used during filming, which is generally the case. As Ethan Coen admitted to dazeddigital.com: “There were several cats. As the animal trainer said to us, a dog wants to please you; a cat only wants to please itself. So that’s a problem in terms of getting it to do a specific thing… You then just shoot a lot of film, because 99.7 per cent of it is the cat doing what you don’t want it to be doing.”
To read on, please click on one of the pictures of Llewyn Davis holding Ulysses the ginger cat on this page to be whisked directly to the Telegraph website.
CATS ON FILM 
I recently saw this movie, and of course loved that there was a cat in it. The ginger beauty really held the film together, creating much needed tension and emotion. I so wanted the lost cat to be found. And the look of the abandoned cat in the car said it all.
I just posted about Twitch City, a 90’s sitcom starring a cat named Lucky. Have you seen it?
The cat in your avatar picture is beautiful. Are you his can-opener?
Sorry Katzyonetsy, only just spotted your post (running three blogs all by myself – as well as earning a living and trying to write novels and take photographs – is probably about two blogs too many).
I agree – the lovely ginger cat really did provide the film with a structure and narrative it might not otherwise have had. I shall check out Twitch City – thanks for the tip!
Hey, if you have time check out A Girl Who Walks Alone at Night; its’ an Iranian Vampire movie that has a cat as a central character. Good luck with all your projects in the new year!
Thank you, and the best of luck to you too!
Several people have recommended that Iranian film to me, and now you too – I can’t WAIT to see it!!