Purr-fect pick: Is Orangey the most important movie cat of all time? | film

IHalfway through Oscar season, it becomes clear how much work is required to win an Oscar, both in on-screen work and off-screen campaigning. However, keep in mind that many actors have won more than one Oscar. (Emma Stone, one of this year’s Best Actress nominees, has won twice in the past decade.) Meanwhile, only one cat has twice won the Patsy Award — Picture Animal Star of the Year. (The award, presented by the American Humane Society, not to be confused with the Humane Society, was discontinued in 1986.) That cat is Orangi, and is the subject of a small retrospective at New York City’s Metrograph Cinema. Many actors will play a movie like Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Valentine’s Day; Metrograph delves into Orangey’s catalog of a variety of titles and genres.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s presents Orangi in his most famous role: the cat with a less colorful name, the pet of Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn), whom he describes as “a poor slob with no name.” Orangey makes a major appearance at the film’s climax, when Holly releases her pet into an alley as she prepares to leave town, only for Paul (George Peppard) to rush in to retrieve it. It continues the running thread that Cat is part of Holly’s ferocity as well as her possible domestication. What better animal, of course, than one equally inclined to curl up over his temporary mistress and make howling leaps around her apartment?

Audrey Hepburn’s classic won the Orange for the second time. His first role was a larger one in Rhubarb, a decade-old comedy about a cat who inherits an eccentric rich man’s estate, including a Brooklyn baseball team. This sounds like a proto-air bud – there’s nothing in the rule book that says a cat can’t own a baseball team! — but Rhubarb appears to have been made with adults in mind, at least nominally. It’s a 1950s comedy, which is to say it’s more lighthearted than its classic-era counterparts of a decade earlier, and it feels padded (if still entertaining) at 95 minutes. However, Orangi steals a lot of scenes; Even more so than in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, this cat carelessly jumps between pieces of furniture, at one point standing on top of a chandelier. He’s much less memorable than his fellow film co-stars.

However, human stars retain one advantage. There is only one Audrey Hepburn, and there are, admittedly, between two and 40 Oranje. At least two cats played Cat in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and overall it’s difficult to draw any straight lines across Orangey’s biologically possible but logistically questionable credits over 16 years. In-depth research into his career tends to yield conflicting reports. Director and critic Dan Sallet wrote a little about Orangey for Filmmaker magazine, locating a passage from the book Amazing Animal Actors explaining that the making of Rhubarb actually involved enlisting 60 different but similar-looking cats — the film is in black and white, so exactly matching color probably wasn’t a major concern — and selecting 36 specially trainable cats, each performing a particular trick, to create one composite performance. (This defies belief; as much as Rhubarb the Cat does in the film, I’m not sure we see 36 distinct tricks.) A contemporary New York Times article puts the number of Rhubarb’s cats at 10, though director Arthur Lubin described a “prime” cat that bit him, prompting the director to “retaliate with a clever kick” while a Humane Society representative wasn’t looking. This seems consistent with Rhubarb’s character, which was largely unacceptable at first.

Seeing displays of cats within the films and across various titles certainly lends credence to the idea that Orangey was a type of cat, introduced by trainer Frank N., rather than a specific animal. Two films in the Metrograph retrospective showcase Orangey’s genre diversity: he supposedly had a small role in the Western Stranger on Horseback, and a more supporting role in the horror film The Comedy of Terrors — both films directed by Jacques Tourneur, who also, appropriately enough, directed the 1942 classic Cat People. (That was before your time, Orangey.) But despite a shared director, these two cats don’t seem to be much alike in temperament or performance style. The animal on horseback loiters around the lawman’s office like an unfazed and cuddly bodega cat; The one in Terrors (made when Orangey was at least 13 years old) walks around with the strength of a cat half his age. Perhaps he was encouraged by the prospect of sharing scenes with a group of horror stars; With Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre, this may be the most stacked group in the Orangi (with all due respect to Ms. Hepburn).

It’s more fun, of course, to imagine Orangey embarking on a unique 16-year career, rather than flitting in and out of random scenes from different films. In this sense, his spiritual successor is the orange cat from Inside Llewyn Davis, also played by several cats, and described by director Joel Coen as “a pain in the ass.” As Quinn says, dogs often want to please people; Cats have a bit of that interest, which of course leads to them attracting our attention even more. It’s like watching a child in a movie; You’re struck by the cuteness and then, perhaps, by the strange sensation that for a moment you’re watching someone on screen who can’t actually act in the conventional sense. For children and cats, the sights are real, regardless of whether they involve ridiculous conspiracies, murderous funeral directors, or fake socialites (and also regardless of whether the cat in question cares at all). Even the most intense human actors pretend. Orangi, in all its indeterminate forms, actually lives in the movies.