The Cat and the Canary

The Cat and the Canary (1978)

For God's Sake, Stay in Your Rooms and Lock the Doors!

A group of potential heirs gather in a forbidding old house to learn which of them will inherit a fortune. Later, they learn that a flesh-rending maniac is loose.

Date of release
1978-11-01
TMDB
5.7 / 10 (47)
Runtime
1h 38m
Genres
Horror, Comedy, Mystery
Director
Radley Metzger

Casting

Interesting facts

The Cat and the Canary is a 1978 horror film directed by Radley Metzger and starring Honor Blackman, Michael Callan, Edward Fox, Wendy Hiller, Olivia Hussey, Wilfred Hyde-White, Beatrix Lehmann, Carol Lynley, Daniel Massey, and Peter McEnery. It follows a group of potential heirs who are summoned to the mansion of a deceased beneficiary to view the filmed reading of his will, only to discover upon arrival that a deranged killer may have infiltrated the event.

Production

The Crosby character was originally written as male, and initially intended for James Mason. The Cyrus West's role was first offered to Robert Morley and Alastair Sim, while Flora Robson, Cathleen Nesbitt and Elisabeth Bergner passed on the role of Mrs. Pleasant. Horst Buchholz was signed to play Charlie Wilder, but left the project during pre-production.

Principal photography started in December 1976. Pyrford Court, Pyrford Common Road, Surrey, was used as Cyrus West's Glenncliff Manor.

Radley Metzger later recalled:It was a fun picture, but the litigation involved was horrendous. The distributor chose not to honor the contract. We sued, and it is very difficult to be the aggressor in a law suit. After all those years of defending myself in censorship cases in which we never lost one, there I was trying to create a case on the other side. It took a very long time. We won the suit because it was an obvious breach.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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