Pudge the penguin and Danny the cat.

Our Hero is only momentarily dejected, for he soon gets encouragement from little Pudge the Penguin and giant studio mascot Wooly the Mammoth. With Pudge on percussion and Wooly on piano, Danny draws the animal extras into a big musical number in the studio's back alley. As the animals get into the spirit of things, their grayness goes and they take on Technicolor (one of the film's extremely clever palette shifts.) Danny even taunts Sawyer into outdancing him, and we know Boy will (inevitably!) get Girl.

Vengeful, crafty Darla invites Danny up to her shocking-pink mansion. Batting her eyelashes coquettishly (savagely chomping heads off of animal crackers all the while), she promises an audition for the animals in front of studio head L.B. Mammoth. She offers free use of the Ark Angel sound stage. Danny, oblivious to her devious behavior, takes the bait. There's another clever palette shift as Darla has a luridly colored fantasy of Danny and Sawyer dancing across a hellish green landscape.

Darla arranges a flood reminiscent of Noah's to ruin the animals' big audition, humiliating them in front of L.B., who swears they'll never work in this town again. The animals turn on Danny, who almost heads back to Kokomo, but then gets a last-minute inspiration. His scheme wins the animals' a successful second audition. Darla's frantic attempts to ruin the animals' show only serve to improve it. In an echo of the denouement of Singin' in the Rain, Darla is unmasked as the animal hating little miscreant she is, sinking her career and launching those of Danny and his friends.

One of Danny's musical numbers.

Like Broadway's recent Gershwin-crammed hit, Crazy for You, Cats Don't Dance moves along briskly, propelled by show-stopping numbers, obvious plot devices and musical comedy clichés. In this kind of story, predictability becomes an asset. You know what's going to happen but keep watching to see precisely how the makers will contrive to bring it about.

If someone took a time machine back to 1955 in order to route an MGM Alan Freed Unit musical through Termite Terrace, the results would look a lot like this. It's a hybrid that never would have occurred to me, but I'm glad first-time director Mark Dindal thought of it, and I hope his unit stays together --they've got a lot of class. I'm curious to see what they'll tackle next.



Mark Segall has won awards for labor journalism and public service copywriting. He co-authored How To Make Love To Your Money (Delacorte,1982) with his wife, Margaret Tobin. He is also editor of ASIFA-East's aNYmator newsletter.