The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing
On the run from her violent husband, Catherine Crocker witnesses a train robbery and is taken prisoner by a frontier outlaw gang, led by a bandit who’s hiding a secret of his own.
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- Cast：
- Burt Reynolds , Sarah Miles , Lee J. Cobb , Jack Warden , George Hamilton , Bo Hopkins , Robert Donner
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Reviews
Undescribable Perfection
To me, this movie is perfection.
Best movie ever!
It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.
The most romantic Burt Reynolds I've ever seen is the Burt that heads the cast of The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. He's also dangerous and deadly when he has to be.Reynolds like James Garner is usually comic and cynical in his best remembered films. But in this one he becomes quite the romantic hero, almost like out of a romance novel especially to the object of his affection Sarah Miles.Burt heads an outlaw gang that consists of Bo Hopkins, Jack Warden, and Jay Varela and one fine day while they're robbing a train Sarah Miles crosses their path. She's running away from her husband George Hamilton, her rich husband who's paying a lot of good wages for a personal posse. Caught in the middle of all this is Wells Fargo man Lee J. Cobb.Reynolds and Miles make such a great romantic couple rarely seen in westerns. Jimmy Stewart and Debra Paget in Broken Arrow come closest to mind, but Stewart was an unabashed hero, not like Reynolds the outlaw.The title refers to the name of Reynolds's Shoshone wife Cat Dancing who died years earlier. That story is essential to understanding how Reynolds's character developed as it did. Miles is a woman who finds true love, but also gets a lot of romantic notions knocked out of a silly head.For fans of westerns and romance.
The man who loved Cat Dancing is different from most westerns in that it is focused on relationships. This may not be surprising, in the light of the fact that the novel it is based on was written by a woman. In the movie, the woman (Sarah Miles) is really the central character, and the central man (Burt Reynolds) is somewhat secondary.We follow the man from a train robbery to his trying to get his children back, and realizing that he's not going to get them. We also follow the woman's emotional changes. She at first is simply running away from a husband she does not love. She later has sex with a man who has protected her, and is raped by a sociopath. She comes to love, and is loved. And this is a quintessential "chick flick," except that it's a western.Some men will like it, as well as some women.
John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Humphry Bogart, James Coburn, Lee Marvin, Sean Connery, Harrison Ford -- well maybe not Harrison Ford -- created unique male personas on film and Burt Reynolds joins them. Cat Dancing is a 70's road film on horseback and Reynolds' performance shines with personal subtlety among other luminaries including Jack Warden, George Hamilton, Lee J. Cobb, and Jay Silverheels (AKA Tonto). The story line is not predictable and angst threads through the script. True love, what is it? The answer rolls down from the screen in Cat Dancing while Burt bites the dust and recovers. The Western by the 1970's was fading, but Cat Dancing proves the genre can be fresh in any decade.
will this ever be put out on DVD? Burt Reynolds best movie. Burt was so good looking in this movie. I love him as a cowboy. I have this on VHS and I would love to have it on DVD. They don't make many good westerns anymore. I wish they did. Burt was so good in this movie. I even love where its filmed looks rugged and so old west. Even the old mining town looks just like a very old mining town. The horse Sarah Miles rides such a pretty horse. She should have took more riding lessons before the movie and couldn't they have let her just ride instead of riding on the side like a girl. Burt riding his horse up in the snow till he breaks his leg is hard to watch that part.