The Fat Black Pussycat (1963)

The Fat Black Pussycat belongs to an intriguing sub-genre - beatnik murder mysteries/crime thrillers. Other movies in this tiny sub-genre include The Moving Finger (1963) and The Beat Generation (1959).

A detective, Dave Walsh, is assigned to a murder case. The victim, a young woman, was part of the beatnik subculture and Dave finds himself having to enter what is to him a very strange world. He’s not really hip to it at all.

There’s a connection to a beatnik hangout, The Fat Black Pussycat Cafe. That’s where Dave’s investigation starts.

There’s another murder. And the detective’s briefcase gets stolen. That doesn’t seem like a big deal but we have seen someone doing something very suspicious indeed to that briefcase.

He doesn’t make much headway with the beatniks. They don’t like squares and they don’t like cops and he falls into both those categories. He does have hopes of getting some information from a pretty lady anthropologist named Janet. She lives down the hallway from the apartment in which a crazy beatnik party has been going on. She’s conducting an anthropological study of the beatniks.

It becomes apparent that there’s a serial killer on the loose. The killer is obviously a psycho which is bad enough but he may be a beatnik as well which makes him even more dangerous.

So far it sounds like a routine serial killer movie but there are some nicely bizarre touches. A black cat (an actual cat of the feline variety) keeps turning up at the crime scenes. A psychiatrist at New York State University has a theory - the cat is picking up the brain waves of the psycho killer.

So you get half-baked psychiatry and half-baked paranormal phenomena - a winning combination in my book.

The murders continue. This movie has a remarkably high body count. And the murders are quite bloody by the standards of 1963.

These beatnik movies are interesting because they were all made within a fairly narrow timeframe. By 1963 the beatnik subculture was about to be swept away by new youth subcultures. Swinging London was already well underway. The Mods had started to appear in England. The Beatles had their first number one hit in 1963. The Flower Children would soon make their appearance. Which makes the short-lived beatnik moral panic rather amusing.

Given the production history of this movie it is of course quite likely that the original version was shot somewhat earlier than 1963.

Harold Lea wrote and directed this film and it seems that it marked both the beginning and the end of his film-making career.

This movie was apparently very extensively and radically revised and re-edited and with lots of extra footage shot to replace existing scenes. This was probably done without any input from the film’s original director. The Something Weird DVD includes the many deleted scenes. It’s obvious that the original version of The Fat Black Pussycat was an entirely different movie. And the identity of the murderer was changed. It’s not hard to see why the changes were made. The deleted scenes include some very feeble comedy. I believe that the paranormal stuff involving the cat was among the material that was added, and that’s the element that gives the movie its weird interesting vibe.

There’s no nudity, apart from the opening credits sequence. There’s some sex but it’s so incredibly tame that those scenes hardly qualify as sex scenes.

The Fat Black Pussycat is an oddity but I like oddball movies. And I like beatnik movies. If you don’t set your expectations too high it’s quite a fun movie. Recommended.

This movie is part of a Something Weird DVD double-header, paired with The Black Cat (1966). The Fat Black Pussycat gets a very decent transfer. As usual with these Something Weird double-headers you get some equally oddball extras including a truly bizarre cat-themed burlesque routine.