Imagine Christopher Walken in orange playing an orange and white tabby cat. And singing and dancing, to boot…
As Puss ‘N Boots
Yes, indeed, he’s just got his boots in this 1988 Cannon film of the fairy tale by Charles Perrault (attributed here to the Brothers Grimm) and now he’s doing a softshoe on the hay littered floor of a barn. And, no, he doesn’t dance very well and doesn’t sing very well either. But it’s Christopher Walken in an orange poet shirt and orange knicker pants setting off to seek his fortune with the third son of the miller, happy to have his boots now, not satisfied with bread and cheese and wanting the good life.
Christopher Walken crouching behind a bush on hands and knees, shaking his kitty cat rear as he prepares to catch a pheasant in his bag–now, that’s a moment in movie history.
Another not to be missed moment in cinema history is when he sings the miller’s son to sleep.
“Go to sleep my friend, dream of lovely things, of a prince and princess and castle…yes I’ll watch over you…watching over you is what I must do.”
The miller’s son is played by (get this) Jason Connery.
“Connery?” you say?
Yes, a son of Sean Connery.
Nothing messes with your mind like watching the son of Zardoz sung to sleep by Vincenzo Coccotti.
Walken also starred that year in the movie “Homeboy” directed by Mickey Rourke. In 1989 he starred as Whitley Strieber in “Communion”. I don’t know whether he considers this an artistically dry period in his career or if he thought of it as a fun break in psycho typecasting. I hope the latter.
Surprisingly enough, despite the low budget production values and a not very promising opening, it turns out to be a pretty amusing film. The court sets are clever, generous enough with color and texture that one feels somewhere between an upscale Holiday Inn and a third cousin, four times removed, of “Barry Lyndon”. With Yossi Jacobs as the King, Ilki Jacobs as Lady Clara and Amnon Meskin as the ogre, there’s a lot of stagy, posturing, buffoonish fun with the court, again in fairly delightful costumes a cut above average. The peculiar odd woman out among the powdered white wigs and colorful make-up is the princess in a too disturbing 1988 high school prom permanent in natural brown, but then she is supposed to be a princess who was never successfully molded for artifice and yearns to play the goose girl, so she is delighted to learn her prospective prince is actually a miller’s son, which is the one significant departure this tale takes from the Perrault, the confession of the miller’s son to her that he is not really a noble.
Another peculiarity of the film is its mixed message. We are sold that the simpler of things of life are the best and that the nobles are all hypocrites, even though the goal of the film is the pursuit of the comfortable, highly embellished life style of the nobles, the cat proving to the King that the Marquis really does possess 100 thousand bushels of wheat and a castle with a thousand rooms and one hundred horses each supplied by a different sultan and a chest full of precious jewels, which makes the king very happy and saves the miller’s son’s neck and wins him the hand of the princess.
Walken managed to make me buy him as the cat. He has a scene where he irons handkerchiefs and I bought that he irons handkerchiefs. I bought that he ate the ogre.
“You’re looking at a happy cat, a smug and slightly sappy cat…” Walken sings at the end, and in a wicked feat of Walken mischief we are convinced (or I was) that he is certainly the cat servant of the Miller Marquis, eager for nothing but the best for his master. Plus, we are reminded that actors are far more conniving than nobles.
Too bad I didn’t buy Jason Connery as the miller’s son who becomes a marquis. Though Walken was 45 I’m sure if he’d also played Jason Connery’s role, I would have bought him as the third and youngest son of the miller.
He could have played the ogre too! And the king. And the princess! Now, that would have been some fairy tale.
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