Great Britain, United States

• Mousey

Cat and Mouse is a macabre shocker about a timid man's efforts at retaliation against the whole of society for the pain suffered in a personal tragedy. Kirk Douglas plays the owlish biology teacher, George Anderson (Mousey to his pupils), whose transformations into a violent and frenzied killer reflects the dangerous contortions of a hurt mind. Devastated by his wife Laura's decision to divorce him, George is determined that nothing and no-one is going to come between him and the child he always believed he had fathered. But one cruel blow follows another as Laura attempts to draw the affections of the child away from the husband she despises. In the emotional wastes of a life rendered meaningless and utterly wretched on account of woman he once loved, George's thoughts begin to focus on plans to avenge his misery. In a haunting scene which is a chilling portent of what is to come, he quits his job and, with animal cunning, goes to ground in the sleazy rooming houses of Montreal. It is here that we witness the ghastly metamorphosis of a gentle, kind and unassuming man into a blood-thirsty and vicious predator. Here we experience the nerve-wracking build-up to the fiendish game of cat and mouse which turns with all its might upon the guilt-ridden Laura.