Given that Peter Bogdanovich was once at the center of a Hollywood death scandal himself, when his girlfriend Dorothy Stratten was murdered by her estranged husband in 1980, you'd think he'd be a good choice to direct a film about another infamous Hollywood death scandal. This is what he provides in The Cat's Meow, which is based upon the play of the same name by Steven Peros.

Thomas Harper Ince was one of the pioneers of filmmaking in Hollywood, scoring his first film acting job in 1906 and then establishing himself as a producer and director of Westerns in the 1910s. By 1924, though, his career was long since on the skids, confined mostly to supervision of films. Then, on November 19th that year, he died under circumstances that are still mysterious. The official version stated that Ince died of heart failure following a party on William Randolph Hearst's yacht, although another version of the story has Ince being shot by Hearst, who had somehow mistaken him for Charlie Chaplin, who was another of the guests at the party and who was reported as having an affair with Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies. Without saying any more, it's probably evident which version of the tale is presented in the film.

Bogdanovich does a reasonable job of making you forget the film's theatrical origins. Although it all takes place in a fairly closed and confined set, i.e. Hearst's yacht out on the sea, I still didn't get the impression of it being a filmed play. Unfortunately, though, he also tends to maintain a certain distance from the material. If you know the various stories of what supposedly happened to Thomas Ince, and some degree of prior knowledge of the affair is kind of assumed, then The Cat's Meow isn't going to offer you any surprises, as Bogdanovich and Peros don't exactly have an original solution to the mystery; and much like the actual event itself the film just tapers off without coming to a real ending, forcing Bogdanovich to leave a pretty strained platitude as a conclusion.

The real problem is with the characters, who somehow never seem entirely like real people, which is problematic because, after all, they are real people. Apart from that, most of them are too unsympathetic to get close to: Hearst comes over in typically monstrous fashion, Ince is a venal little figure trying to rebuild his broken career regardless of the consequences, and Chaplin is an oversexed lech dogged by the failure of his last film and the pregnancy of his latest teenage lover.

Despite that, some of the performances are still interesting. Jennifer Tilly is particularly good as the appalling Louella Parsons, Hearst's gossip in residence, starting off as a somewhat gauche clown but eventually revealing herself as something very sharp and nasty indeed. Kirsten Dunst is fairly good as the rather unfortunate Marion Davies. On the debit side, Eddie Izzard is too fat to make his Chaplin convincing, and doesn't make a lot of effort anyway, while Joanna Lumley is fine as the novelist Elinor Glyn but woefully underused.

The Cat's Meow has been drawing some critical comparisons with Robert Altman's Gosford Park, although in my mind the Altman film is a much better one. Bogdanovich's film isn't exactly bad, but it is one where you'll get more out of it if you already have some prior knowledge of or affinity with the time and place it presents.