User Reviews

What an original and ingenious hiding of the vault behind the fridge! Danielle Gaubert is beautiful and looks great in the black outfit. She reminded Sylva Koscina in "Judex" and, of course, Marisa Mell in "Danger: Diabolik". Danielle Gaubert even looks very much like Marisa Mell, as if they were two twin sisters and, unfortunately, both died very young, of cancer. Julien Guiomar, as usual, is very good as a rogue cop. Michel Duchaussoy is colorless, odorless and totally mediocre. Sacha Pitoëff also makes a high-class gangster character. Francis Lai's music is not at all what would have needed this film, which could have been much better than it is.

Going to visit Liverpool for the first time with a friend,we caught the return train, (which should take 40 minutes) just in time. At the very next stop in a empty, rural station, the train broke down. Left with no advice after the staff jumped on the first passing train and left all the passengers stranded, what should have been a 40 minute ride,ended up lasting 3 and a half hours. Finally getting home,I wanted to just watch an easy-going movie. Finding Mario Bava's Danger: Diabolik (1968-also reviewed) outstanding, and enjoying both "Kriminal" flicks (also reviewed) I was taken by the Diabolik comparison in dbdumonteil's wonderful review,which led to the cat showing her golden claws to me.

View on the film:

Looking so fit in her figure-hugging outfits,Daniele Gaubert, (who was only 44 when she died from cancer in 1987) steals the film with her groovy turn as Tilmont. Performing her own impressive acrobatic stunts, Gaubert gives Tilmont a pulpy, sophisticated thief charm, with Gaubert capturing Tilmont's long-con mind-set. As she steals whilst others are distracted by her looks. Although the flick is in French, the moments that co-writer/(with Marcel Jullian and Jean-Paul Guibert) director Edouard Logereau & cinematographer Roland Pontoizeau make the most stylised to Comic-Book colours leans towards Italian cinema, via the stop-start zoom-ins on Timont's beautiful face,and optical, sniper-vision pans, letting the viewer follow Timont's eye on the next target. Presented with chances to make this adaptation of Albert Sainte-Aube's novel a franchise starter, the writers badly miss the mark by holding Timont's eye-catching humorous thieving skills, in order for a plodding espionage plot to dominate proceedings, and trim the golden claws of the cat girl.

"La Louve solitaire" was first a series of novels,then a comic strip ,which ,like "Diabolik" was "strictly for adults " before being transferred to the screen for a movie which seems more appreciated abroad than in its native France .

André Saint-Aube ,who created the character ,was probably inspired by Louis Feuillade's heroine ,Musidora ,who,in "les Vampires" (1915),wandered on the roofs of Paris in black tights ;on the other hand,as an user pointed out,Luc Besson was certainly inspired by the beginning of the movie (La Louve framed and forced to work for the government) to create "Nikita" .

The plot ,which deals with drug traffickers ,is banal.Francis Lai's score sometimes bears more than a distant resemblance to that of James Bond ,and sometimes falls into schmaltz ,which predates his "love story" music which charted high everywhere.

The late sixties saw the rise of woman's lib ,and this heroine displayed a firm independence of men;and a woman who performed acrobatics ,complete with flying trapeze ,to achieve her aims,at that! Danielle Gaubert was a shooting star of the French cinema :she began her career with directors from the old age (Autant-Lara and Carné ) ;then her good looks led her to pose for soft-porn magazines ;after her marriage to ski champion Killy ,she gave up acting in 1972 and sadly died of cancer in the eighties .

Her pairing with highly talented Michel Duchaussoy ,in a part of an agent capable of reading on the lips ,is a good thing :the moments when they enjoy French breakfasts display a good chemistry between them,and that,without a single kiss!Notice that at the end of the movie ,La Louve cannot eat croissants anymore.This little detail means a lot.Duchaussoy,who recently passed away ,was a favorite of Claude Chabrol ("Que La Bete Meure) and Alain Jessua (with whom he made several movies including "Traitement De Choc").The cast also features Sacha Pitoëff ("L Année Dernière A Marienbad") as a chic villain.

The movie was not a big success,perhaps because of the macho audience,and there was no sequel.

La Louve Solitaire, which I saw as "Golden Claws of Cat Girl" (a title worthy of ten stars alone), stars stunning redhead Danielle Gaubert as trapeze artist turned cat burglar Françoise. There's more than a little hint of Nikita in the way Françoise is forced to work for the government after being caught red-handed on a job and one can't help but wonder whether Luc Besson saw this before making that movie. Assisted by undercover agent and gifted lip-reader Bruno (Michel Duchaussoy), Françoise undertakes a daring heist to help nail a drug trafficking gang. Complications inevitably ensue.

The heist sequence is reasonably well-done and is the highlight of this fairly obscure little movie which suffers badly from an uneven tone. Whereas Françoise has all the makings of a comic book heroine – a sexy, catsuit-clad superthief with remarkable acrobatic abilities - La Louve Solitaire is a grey, gloomy movie. Françoise is too cold and remote a character to empathise with and the script lacks the snap and humour that would have brought her flirtations with Bruno to life. Danielle Gaubert certainly looks the part, but her glacial beauty was put to far better use in Radley Metzger's 'Camille 2000'.

Aficionados of 1960s interior design might like to check out Franciose's apartment, but others should check out Mario Bava's Diabolik instead - a movie which has the humour and sparkle La Louve Solitaire desperately lacks. 4/10.

Seems to me, beautiful actress, Daniele Gaubert was a bit unfortunate in film. She works her socks off in this. In fact she takes everything off to don a fantastic all over black skin tight costume, does some of her own stunts and acts better than anyone else but to little overall effect. She was also in the following year's, Camille2000 (Radley Metzger) and that should have turned out better than it did. Here there is clearly a real lack of budget, with far too much shot in flat poorly lit TV like studio sets and a male cast unable to deliver hardly any of the, admittedly poorly written, lines with any conviction at all. Great shame because Gaubert is great in and out of that costume but has to do everything herself. Useless soundtrack doesn't help and must surely have been chopped about by someone afterwards, barely ever seeming to match a sequence with any understanding.

In The Golden Claws of the Cat Girl, Daniele Gaubert showed she had the acting ability to go with her sultry looks. Released a year before Camille 2000 made her an international sensation, Cat Girl is the one movie she should be remembered for. It was also released right around the same time as Mario Bava's quirky Danger Diabolik!, which you can see from the same face mask both anti-heroes wear. The title is a little strange: the original French title was La Louve Solitaire, which roughly translates as Lone Wolf in English or, to be accurate, The Solitary She Wolf. I'm guessing some advertising maven went with the sensationalist title for the American Dive-In circuit.

The film begins with a burglary. A masked thief steals into a country Chalet and rips off the toff owners of the place while they are throwing a party. When said burglar pulls off the mask, it is revealed to be Françoise Tilmont (Gaubert) a real estate agent by day and cat burglar by night. She uses the knowledge gained from showing off posh estates to snobs as a means to case the joints. But Ms. Tilmont's second story work has attracted the attention of the wrong people in high places: two government officials who need a clandestine operative to break-up a drug smuggling ring. They find out about Ms. Tilmont and decide she's perfect for the job.

The government officials who recruit her team the cat girl up with Bruno (Michel Duchaussoy), a minor functionary who has another gift they desperately need: lip reading. Bruno lost his hearing in a bomb explosion at an early age, but got it back a few years previously while skin diving. However, he learned how to lip read while he was deaf. The plan is to put Françoise and Bruno in a hotel room across from the office the drug dealers use. Bruno can lip read what is going on across the street and, when the moment arrives, Françoise can scale into the office building and grab all the evidence the government officials need to put the crooks behind bars.

But the plan goes out of control. In the few days Bruno and Françoise are together, they develop feelings for each other. This doesn't compromise the mission, but it complicates it. Because when the entire operation spins out of control, Bruno and Françoise are willing to sacrifice everything for each other.

I had to play the sequence where Bruno and Françoise are together in the hotel room over several times to understand what was going on between the two. There's a lot of dialogue, which made me grateful for the dubbed English version I watched. It's subtle, but obvious. Something has changed in their working relationship. But when Françoise walks into the room wearing Bruno's shirt, there's no doubt. It was still 1968 and filmmakers found it pertinent to exercises a little caution as far as sexual relations on screen were concerned. The key to understanding what transpired is buried in the dialogue. Earlier in the film, after Françoise has been recruited by the government, she's seen leaving a nightclub in the early morning with her clueless date. As they approach her car, Françoise's date makes a comment as to how "making love in the morning can prevent wrinkles". After Bruno and Françoise have been working on the case he enters her room quietly in the morning with a breakfast tray. It's not hard to fill in the blanks beyond that.

I should also point out I'm basing everything off the English dubbing, which can be less than precise. For instance, when Bruno is about to see Françoise off on her mission, he gently strokes her ninja mask, kisses her on the forehead and says something. In the English dub, it gets translated as "Pussyfoot". What? I went back and played the French dialogue through several times until I could understand what he really said. Turns out it's "Fe garrie", which is an idiomatic French term meaning "Take care." Essentially, he's asking her to be careful.

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The influences of Cat Girl extend far and wide. The composer would later write the memorable score for Love Story. I'm sure it inspired Luc Besson, who has made his career with movies about Girls Who Kick Butt, but are tender on the inside. I see a lot of it in La Femme Nakita and The Fifth Element.

On another level, Cat Girl is every comic book nerd's fantasy woman. Françoise drives a nondescript Minicooper with a white top when she's in her Sister Jekyll mode, but switches to a cherry red Dodge Firebird for her nighttime activities. In one scene, where she ditches her dull date, Françoise drives the mini into an elevator and comes out driving the Firebird. Holy fuel injection, Batman! Bruno is a minor functionary in the French foreign service who gets recalled from Istanbul to utilize his talents. He's the nowhere man who finally gets his big chance with the striking athletic Amazon. And he charms her: "How do you look so beautiful in the morning?"

But in the end the cat woman remains very much alone. An anomaly in a world that has no use for her other than the occasional suicide mission. If anything this movie made me want to read the novels the character was based upon. But they're only available in French, dammit. http://www.z7hq.com/pulp/golden-claws-cat-girl-1968.php