The most romantic Burt Reynolds I've ever seen is the Burt that heads the cast of The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. He's also dangerous and deadly when he has to be.Reynolds like James Garner is usually comic and cynical in his best remembered films. But in this one he becomes quite the romantic hero, almost like out of a romance novel especially to the object of his affection Sarah Miles.Burt heads an outlaw gang that consists of Bo Hopkins, Jack Warden, and Jay Varela and one fine day while they're robbing a train Sarah Miles crosses their path. She's running away from her husband George Hamilton, her rich husband who's paying a lot of good wages for a personal posse. Caught in the middle of all this is Wells Fargo man Lee J. Cobb.Reynolds and Miles make such a great romantic couple rarely seen in westerns. Jimmy Stewart and Debra Paget in Broken Arrow come closest to mind, but Stewart was an unabashed hero, not like Reynolds the outlaw.The title refers to the name of Reynolds's Shoshone wife Cat Dancing who died years earlier. That story is essential to understanding how Reynolds's character developed as it did. Miles is a woman who finds true love, but also gets a lot of romantic notions knocked out of a silly head.For fans of westerns and romance.

The theme of this movie is rape. Sarah Miles is running away from George Hamilton, her husband. She stumbles into a train robbery and is taken hostage by the bandits. Bo Hopkins tries to rape her first. Then Jack Warden wants in on it. Burt Reynolds stops them. Then some Native Americans come along and try to rape her. This may well be the last Western ever made in which Native Americans try to rape a white woman. Most of the Native Americans in the movie are good, however, as are pretty much all the Native Americans portrayed in movies afterwards, so this movie is transitional. Anyway, Warden finally gets his chance, and he succeeds in raping Miles. Then we find out that Burt Reynolds killed his wife, Cat Dancing, because a man had raped her. But that apparently does not bother Miles, because she and Reynolds end up living happily ever after. I wish I could say that Miles was running away from her husband because he raped her too, just to round out the story, but all we know is that he is an unpleasant character.

I always liked Burt Reynolds, but have generally seen him in self effacing roles that allow his humorous and devilish side come through; that's probably why "The Longest Yard" is my favorite Reynolds film. I think he handles his movie Western roles well enough, but it's not the genre I prefer seeing him in. In "The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing", Reynolds' character is a driven man on the trail to retrieve his two children from a Shoshone tribe, left behind we come to learn, after he killed the man who raped his wife, the 'Cat Dancing' character of the film's title. That he also killed his Indian bride in a jealous rage is a point that seems to be glossed over in the story, and doesn't square with the sense of honor and justice that Indian tribes maintain for their own personal conduct. I was left wondering why Jay Wesley Grobard (Reynolds) was even allowed to return to the Shoshone camp, and once there, why he wasn't called on to atone for his past. In fact, Grobard wasn't even an honorable character at the start of the movie, but a train robber who's gang is disrupted by the intrusion of a woman on the run from her husband. The story's twist is that her own name is Catherine/Cat, thereby completing the connection with the title character.Of course, Catherine's (Sarah Miles) husband hires on a tracker (Lee J. Cobb) to find his wife who he believes is kidnapped. You never get the impression that Crocker (George Hamilton) isn't a decent enough guy in his own right, only that his wife doesn't love him enough to want to stay married. With Grobard's gang, Catherine gets more than she's bargained for, having to fend off the lecherous likes of Bo Hopkins' Billy, and Jack Warden's Dawes. Dawes in particular turns out to be the vile snake of the bunch, just check how many kidney shots he gives to old Billy Boy. Reflecting back on that now, the arrival of Catherine turns out to be the undoing of just about everyone in the picture.It was cool to see Jay Silverheels in one of his last movie roles, but gee, they went kind of heavy on the old warrior makeup to portray him as Shoshone Chief Washaki. The Chief had one of the better lines in the picture as he parleyed with Grobard - "The cigar was one of the white man's good ideas" - an interesting observation. But probably the best was Billy's description of Catherine after she cleaned herself up on the trail - "Well, if she don't look as fresh as a daisy next to an outhouse"! What wonderful imagery.

It amazes me how many people see this movie as a B grade western! I found it to be an excellent adaptation of a decent western genre book that happened to have been written by a WOMAN. The casting could not have been more perfect in that each person played their character so well. And the characters were a 'spoof' at the cliché of melodrama types that most westerns portray anyway. This is a story about how people LIE to themselves and end up not only ruining their own lives, but harming those near them too. And how honesty comes hard and maybe late, but can come before one dies. The only flaw of the movie is that it didn't tell the full tale of Cat Dancing and the tragedy that befell her, Burt's character and their children's lives. On the other hand, I liked the movie ending better than the book's.