Gale Sondergaard has designs on Renne Jarrett in The Cat Creature.
Where to begin with all of the metaphorical lesbian double-entendre that director Curtis Harrington cheekily supplies in The Cat Creature (1973)? And how to explain that some of it was purely unintentional, as the openly gay Harrington had no way of knowing then that Meredith Baxter was not quite the woman that networks — and viewers — imagined her to be. (And then there’s the smaller matter of her hunky love interest, David Hedison, whose lookalike daughter Alexandra became one of Hollywood’s most visible A-list lesbians in a time when there were few.)
This pulpy tale, adapted by Psycho author Robert Bloch from his own material, is thin on story and long on atmosphere. It begins with appraiser Frank Lucas (Kent Smith) recording a voice memo for the attorney that hired him to inventory a wealthy and secretive dead man’s estate. “This place gives me the shivers,” he says of the darkened mansion before descending into its cellar, which contains a priceless collection of ancient artifacts. Prying open a sarcophagus, he finds a mummy wearing a striking gold amulet with emerald eyes.
The killer bee genre is a crowded one, with films like The Swarm (1978, starring Michael Caine in his “Sure, whatever, pay me in cash” phase); 1995’s Deadly Invasion: The Killer Bee Nightmare; and, perhaps most famously, My Girl (1991). I could go on and on. What makes this killer bee telefilm, creatively titled Killer Bees, so special, is its cast. Forget Kate Jackson and Lillian Gish, a memorable pairing in Thin Ice (1981). Here we have Kate Jackson and Gloria Swanson.
It opens with a pushy salesman pulling up to a filling station. The attendant (John Getz of Blood Simple) warns him not to trespass onto the neighboring Van Bohlen Winery property, but he does so anyway, and is summarily killed by bees. Forgive me, I’m being flippant. Technically, a swarm follows him into his car (it would’ve been funny if they had voice boxes like Richard Romanus in Night Terror), resulting in a crash and an enormous explosion. “I told him. I told the darn fool,” the gas station attendant mutters. Must happen all the time.
Does Lizabeth Scott have Perez Hilton bookmarked? We know she glances at tabloid covers, if this blurb at Contact Music is any indication. The website quotes the 85-year-old actress, who has spent decades denying interview requests, as saying, “I saw Kate Moss and her new beau all over the cover on the news-stand and thought they looked like vagrants; so scruffy and grubby—just awful. I’d like to see Miss Moss smarten up her act. Doesn’t she know young women look up to her? She would have lasted 10 seconds under the Hollywood studio system.”
Scott goes on to praise Paris Hilton, Victoria Beckham and Dita Von Teese as celebrities with genuine senses of style, saying, “Two of the three might not be the sharpest tools in the box, but they are glamorous and always impeccably turned out.”
Could it be that Scott, the gorgeous starlet whose career was all but over by the time she was outed by Confidential in the mid-1950s (she sued them for libel, and contrary to what has been reported on several websites, didn’t win the case, which was dismissed on a technicality), is one of those anonymous posters who always replies to Hilton items about Dita Von Teese by typing “FIRST!!!!!!!!”? Or maybe she’s more the Dlisted type, preferring bitchy remarks about Victoria Beckham’s skeletal frame to crude, hastily drawn MS Paint penises pointing at the Spice Girl’s face.
I’ve yet to figure out where Contact Music got their Scott quotes from, so if anyone can help, drop me a line. And if you’ve never seen the luminous Lizabeth in a movie, you must rent The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, pronto. (The Paramount release, which has a nice transfer, not the $4.99 rush jobs by no-name companies.) Seeing Barbara Stanwyck, Lizabeth Scott and Dame Judith Anderson all in the same movie is a bit like watching Jodie Foster act opposite Alexis Smith in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, if you catch my drift, and Martha Ivers is indeed quite strange, one of the oddest noirs you’ll ever come across. Scott is superb in it as a mysterious young woman just released from prison.
It was only the second film she appeared in (Scott started her career in the theater, working as Tallulah Bankhead’s understudy in The Skin of Our Teeth, and years later there were rumors that parts of All About Eve might have been modeled on their relationship), but she wastes little time in illustrating why Paramount’s publicity department called her “The Threat.”
Though she was given little in the way of quality material during her all-too-brief career, Scott had the kind of sultry looks and prickly presence that were tailor-made for film noir, and was briefly seen as the studio’s answer to the Warner Brothers upstart siren Lauren Bacall. And, on a personal note, if I had to be shot by or because of a ’40s femme fatale, she would certainly make the short list of dames worth dying for, right alongside Rita Hayworth, Gene Tierney, Jane Greer and Yvonne De Carlo. (Geez, who knew I was so easy?)
UPDATE: The Scott quotes have been credited elsewhere to the Daily Express.
RECOMMENDED READING: There are Scott fans who’ve sent me defensive emails over the years about her sexuality, even though I never labeled it in this post. More than once I was told “She was a Republican!”, as if that means anything. (So was Rock Hudson.)
The man-crazy take on Scott is more of a recent phenomenon. It’s reflected on fan sites and in iterations of her Wikipedia page linking her to basically every man she was ever photographed with (even names that don’t help the cause, like Van Johnson), a curiosity that wasn’t as common prior to her 2015 death. Historically, the man she was most consistently linked with was producer Hal Wallis, and it was often insinuated that it was a transactional relationship on Scott’s end.
For the more traditional gay Hollywood take on both Scott and her Confidential woes, you might consider consulting books like William J. Mann’s Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 and Diana McLellan’s The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood. The public and private travails of Scott only take up a few pages in each of those volumes, but the details will be of interest to certain readers.
Her name pops up unexpectedly in some memoirs as well. In Curtis Harrington’sNice Guys Don’t Work in Hollywood, the filmmaker (Killer Bees; The Cat Creature) recounts an early gig as a messenger boy for Paramount studios. He recalls lesbian rumors, including those linking her to Bankhead, following her from New York to Hollywood, despite common knowledge of her situation with Wallis. However, he adds nothing new to what’s been previously written.
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