‘Cat Ballou’ Is a Western Spoof Awash in Good, Clean Fun

“Cat Ballou” is little more than a trifle, a cowboy horse opera with only the barest of horse sense. But this star vehicle for Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin was one of the biggest hits of 1965.

Despite the camera’s good-humored ogling of the nubile Fonda, director Elliot Silverstein’s Western spoof proved to be a durable family entertainment. It may not be worthy of the title “classic,” but “Cat Ballou” is diverting enough to offer a pleasant finale to the Unitarian Universalist Church’s “Classic Film Series” on Sunday afternoon at the Fullerton Museum Center.

Besides, it’s for a good cause--all proceeds will benefit the Interfaith Emergency Services program in Fullerton.

The movie opens with Fonda’s Cat Ballou in jail, waiting to be hanged for murder. Sir Harry Percival, the land baron who had her father killed so he could take his ranch, may have died accidentally, but Cat’s still in big trouble.

While Fonda gazes poutily through the bars, we’re given a flock of flashbacks explaining how a proper girl from a finishing school back East would become an outlaw with her own ragged gang.

Back in the ‘60s, before anybody realized how proficient she could be as an actress, Fonda was usually cast as an Americanized version of Brigitte Bardot; she was sexy, but unlike Bardot, somewhat unsure about her erotic power. Fonda beamed while Bardot sulked, but each had much of the same tawny good looks and obvious appeal.

In “Cat Ballou,” Fonda is as fresh and innocent as the sunrise, but men still salivate whenever she walks by.

This makes it easy to start a gang once she’s set her mind on revenge. One needy look from Cat and pocket-change desperadoes played by Dwayne Hickman, Michael Callan and Tom Nardini all join up, soon to be followed by Marvin as Kid Shelleen, a former gunslinger now turned booze hound.

The picture is mildly amusing in a Hollywood hokum way for the first half-hour or so, but everything picks up after Marvin appears. He won an Academy Award as Shelleen, and its the kind of bravura, self-mocking performance that can make a career, which it did in his case.

The first time Cat (and the audience) meet Shelleen, he’s falling from the back of the stagecoach, plopping like a corpse in the town’s dusty street. He’s far from the mythical character she’s read about in dime novels, and when they take him home, put a gun in his hand and ask him to take a shot at a target hung on the barn, Shelleen’s more interested in a shot of whiskey.

Marvin is hilarious, in a thoroughly outsized way, portraying a loser who clutches his romantic past almost as tightly as he does the bottle.

Much of the movie is geared toward Shelleen’s regeneration as he cleans up his act and stumbles toward a confrontation with Percival’s henchman, Tim Strawn, who just happens to be Shelleen’s twin brother. Marvin also played Strawn, making him as hard and menacing as Shelleen is unsteady and comical.

There’s also a great turn by Shelleen’s drunken horse--you keep wondering, how did they get him to do that?

As with the series’ previous pictures, Mal Mealy, a local film buff and former television actor, will introduce “Cat Ballou” and talk a little about its history.