Track of the Cat

While two brothers (Robert Mitchum and William Hopper) track a panther preying on their cattle, emotions boil over at home.

Track of the Cat is a head-scratching failure.

To start with, the color Cinemascope photography switches between beautiful location settings and blatantly obvious studio sets with little rhyme or reason. This dichotomy causes the film to look alternately polished and staged, depending on the scene in question and serves to undercut what little drama the script manages to patch together.

Next, there’s Robert Mitchum turning in a great, top-billed performance as a driven, controlling head of a frontier family, yet he’s hardly in the movie! Instead, much of the plot revolves around his younger brother, played by Tab Hunter, who wants to marry a neighbor girl, much to his mother’s disapproval.

Track of the Cat could have been salvaged in the editing room by reducing the romance sub-plot and playing up the location shots with Mitchum, but director William Wellman insists on turning in a routine soap opera occasionally interrupted by a good Robert Mitchum performance.

Mitchum fans with good fast-forward skills may be able to salvage something from this mess, but others should look elsewhere.