Hit a home run or I’ll scratch your toenails off!
We ran into an unexpected pleasure. There are certain movies which make our teeth itch; we identify them by how predictable they appear to be, and how good for us they appear to be. Such was the apparent case with Rhubarb (1951), a movie about a millionaire leaving his fortune to his cat, Rhubarb, and how the cat becomes a good luck charm for the formerly failing baseball team he had owned.
Sounds painfully predictable, doesn’t it?
But – at least for those of us fortunate enough to be cat owners – it’s a heckuva lot of fun, watching a bedraggled, nasty stray who hoards golf balls turn into a beloved pet who then transforms yet again into the team owner. Along the way there’s a vicious daughter of the deceased, cut out of the will and jealous of it all, and her clever machinations; the quite naturally terrified bookies and their scheme to negate the good luck charm; the soon-to-be married cat guardian and his sweetie, who is allergic to Rhubarb; and a passel of terrified pooches who’d rather not go toe to toe with the big tomcat.
I think one of the keys to this movie’s unexpected success with us was that the very personality of the cat is key thematic material for the movie – gumption, in a word. The millionaire takes delight in the cat, from his golf ball hoarding and dog chasing days to his independence; not seeing that in his daughter induces him to cut her out of the will. It becomes a running undernote of the movie, not insistently played up, but more a wistful minor key melody of persistence and guts in the face of mild problems. The acting is competent, the plot bounces right along, and the millionaire’s home is just as ridiculously ornate as you might expect.
That and the occasional word play. How can I resist a movie with the following dialog?
Lawyer: But that cat may have been powdered or sprayed with some irritant, such as pepper or mustard!
Judge: Point well taken, Mr. Dill.
I shan’t actually recommend it, but if you run across it one rainy afternoon, you could do worse than give this one a ten minute trial.
