Peter Bogdanovich is now best known for playing Dr. Melfi's shrink in The Sopranos. Time was, though, he was a wunderkind filmmaker, one of the easy-riding raging bulls who overturned '70s Hollywood with ground-breaking films, in his case The Last Picture Show.
Less well known still is Bogdanovich's encyclopaedic knowledge of old Hollywood, much of which came direct from source - Orson Welles, for example, once lived with him. The Cat's Meow unites Bogdanovich the filmmaker and the historian. Although directing from Steven Peros' script from his own play, Bogdanovich tells a tale he's known for years, one of the great hushed-up Tinseltown scandals - the mysterious death in November 1924 of one of the guests aboard the yacht of William Randolph Hearst (Welles' target for satire in Citizen Kane) makes a mockery of modern-day Hollywood scandals. It also provides salacious material for Bogdanovich's first theatrical release in years.
The problem is, The Cat's Meow is curiously uninvolving. It never comes to life - even after someone is found dead. Nevertheless, there are pleasures to be found in the performances, particularly in Eddie Izzard's lovelorn Chaplin and Edward Herrmann's paranoid Hearst.