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.
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