Cat Ballou spoofs the Old West, whose adherents take their likker neat, and emerges middlingly successful, sparked by an amusing personality-out close and some sparkling performances.
Cat is a girl - Jane Fonda - and she’s a young lady (educated to be a schoolteacher) vendetta-minded in Wyoming of 1894 when town baddies murder her father for his ranch. She turns into a rootin’, tootin’, lovin’ gunlady, rounds up a gang of devoted followers and stages a train holdup, getting away with a payroll fortune, and holes up in the old Hole in the Wall outlaw lair.
Script juggles the elements of the Roy Chanslor novel producing a set of characters who fit the mood patly. A novel device has Stubby Kaye and Nat ‘King’ Cole as wandering minstrels of the early west, telling the story of the goings-on via a flock of spirited and tuneful songs composed by Mack David and Jerry Livingston.
Fonda delivers a lively interpretation as Cat. Lee Marvin doubles in brass, playing the gunman who shoots down her father and the legendary Kid Shelleen, a terror with the gun, whom she earlier called in to protect her father. In latter character, Marvin is the standout of the picture.
1965: Best Actor (Lee Marvin).
Nominations: Best Adapted Screenplay, Editing, Adapted Music Score, Song (’The Ballad of Cat Ballou’)