Review – The Cat's Meow

Finally Eddie Izzard gets a role he can sink his teeth into. If nothing else, he should get some kind of prize for being the first actor in history to portray Charlie Chaplin without doing the Little Fellow even once. Of course the story didn’t exactly call for it. Instead, here we have the infamous Hollywood tale of how producer Tom Ince managed to meet his end on William Randolph Hearst’s yacht. The most widely-accepted version of Ince’s demise is that Hearst was pissed off at Chaplin for trying to seduce Marion Davies (capably played here by Kirsten Dunst) and ended up shooting Ince after mistaking him for Chaplin. Director Peter Bogdanovich deserves a big scoop of respect for making excellent use of his cast and portraying Tinseltown decadence and violent homicide with almost no on-screen sex or violence. I suppose you need to bring at least some affection for the Roaring Twenties into this experience, but if you like this sort of thing you’re in for a real treat here. Worth seeing