In awe of prestigious European literary names, Samuel Goldwyn brought the Belgian Nobel Prize winner Maurice Maeterlinck, author of The Blue Bird and The Life of the Bee, to Hollywood in the 1920s and gave him carte blanche. The story goes that after reading the great man's draft screenplay, Goldwyn ran through the studio shouting: 'My God! The hero's a bee.' No doubt he would have felt differently had the hero been, as is the case with Cats & Dogs, a beagle, because since silent days the movies have had a highly profitable love affair with what we call 'man's best friend'. Cats, on the other hand, are generally viewed in films as sinister creatures that suddenly spring from dark recesses in horror flicks and are the familiars of witches.
Lawrence Guterman's amusing, inventive film features talking animals and is very much on the side of dogs in their perennial war with cats. In giving unrewarding parts and no decent lines to the humans, it subscribes to the motto of Animal Farm: 'Four legs good, two legs bad.' As in Back to the Future, Gremlins and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, the principal adult is an eccentric freelance inventor, Professor Brody (Jeff Goldblum), whose young son is upset when the family dog disappears to be replaced by Lou, a beagle puppy. The original family dog has been kidnapped by cats because Brody is working on a cure for a canine allergy that will result in humans loving all dogs.
The scheming cats are determined to steal this discovery and transform it into a substance that will pollute the world to make dogs universally loathed. To combat them, the dogs bring in special hounds from London by Concorde and are forced to recruit the untrained beagle puppy as a trainee agent. The latter is framed by a cunning cat who plants a steaming dog turd in the Brody family's hall to get him thrown out of the house, but the pup turns up trumps.
The picture's full of jokes designed to please knowing adolescents rather than small children. This cats' plan, for instance, recalls the diabolical plot at the centre of On Her Majesty's Secret Service and, appropriately, the chief cat resembles Ernst Stavro Blofeld's feline companion and holds conferences at a long table that resembles Spectre's board meetings. The mansion he lives in is introduced by a salute to the opening shot of Citizen Kane. When a cat confronts a dog on the Brodys' landing, the showdown is accompanied by a few chords in the style of an Ennio Morricone western. The cats' leader addresses a hall full of mice in the manner of a Nazi rally and promises to reward these newly recruited allies by giving them Australia all to themselves. A stray dog describes herself as 'domestically challenged'. Cats & Dogs isn't as good as the first Babe movie, but to my surprise I rather enjoyed it.
The homoerotic military movie set in the company of isolated men is a sub-genre that extends from the reticence of Journey's End (directed on stage and screen by the openly homosexual James Whale) to the explicitness of Derek Jarman's Sebastiane and includes John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Sergeant (Rod Steiger as a repressed gay NCO) and the superb Beau Travail. Gohatto, the first film in a decade by Nagisa Oshima, is the latest addition and is set in 1885 Kyoto where the élite band of samurai guarding the Shogun have a 'don't say, don't ask' policy regarding homosexuality similar to that currently practiced in the US army.
At the centre of the film is Kano, an 18-year-old ace swordsman of a somewhat androgynous appearance whose arrival in the midst of this strictly disciplined sodality becomes a major cause of friction. Kano is tested by being ordered on his first day to execute a samurai who has committed the capital offence of borrowing money. This he calmly carries out without getting a speck of blood on his clothes, and he becomes a favourite of the unit's chief. Another newcomer makes sexual advances which Kano initially rejects, but the second-in-command (played by the formidable Beat Takeshi) suspects they have become lovers when he watches them engage in a fencing match.
Kano, however, has turned several other heads. His presence divides the swordsmen, bringing into question the nature of male friendship and leading to a mysterious nocturnal murder. Gohatto (the title of the group's rigid code of conduct) is as visually reticent as Oshima's Ai No Corrida was explicit. It's a slow, formal affair told in an odd manner using titles to comment on and explain the course of events. At a second viewing, I thought rather better of the film than I did when writing a flippant dismissal from Cannes last year.
In the comedy action movie Rush Hour, the martial arts star Jackie Chan played Inspector Lee, a naif Hong Kong cop in Los Angeles working with the streetwise American detective, Inspector Carter, played by the black stand-up comic Chris Tucker. In Rush Hour 2, the situation is reversed, with Carter as the fish out of water in Hong Kong, where the pair are assigned to pursue the leader of a Triad involved, it transpires, with counterfeiting American currency.
The trail leads to Las Vegas and the wrecking of a new casino, and the picture is really a succession of extended, carefully choreographed fights punctuated by the motor-mouthed Tucker doing comic routines in the manner of Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, but sanitised for family audiences.
One of the things that sticks in my mind from a brief visit to Hong Kong some years ago is the use there of bamboo and rope instead of iron-piping and bolts as scaffolding. This gives a curious, old-fashioned beauty to the modern steel-and-glass buildings under construction and the seemingly delicate structures quiver like spiders' webs as the workman scrambles over them. The best sequence in Rush Hour 2 comes early on when Chan fights with a gang of thugs who attempt to escape by climbing up some bamboo scaffolding.
The film's villains - the handsome John Lone of Last Emperor fame as the Triad boss and the lovely, graceful Zhang Ziyi from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as his chief lieutenant - are an altogether more striking pair than the two cops. And the best joke comes in the assembly of out-takes with which Jackie Chan pictures traditionally end. In the movie, a villain crashes through a window and lands on a yellow cab a dozen stories below, eliciting the comment: 'He took a taxi.' In the out-take, the same shot is accompanied by Tucker's adlib comment: 'I guess he won't be in Rush Hour 3.'
