Chow Hound 1951

A large bulldog bullies two unwilling parties—a frightened Cat Mel Blanc and a sharp-tongued mouse—into a series of schemes to obtain dinner from several residences. The bulldog himself repeats that he is starving, and he keeps punishing the cat for what he sees as stealing meat without ever bringing home gravy. The cons escalate as he uses the cat to pose as the family pet for three residents and as an exhibit at a municipal zoo, all while muttering about the constant weight of hunger that gnaws at him.

The plan truly takes shape when the bulldog spots a sign advertising a reward for lost animals and hatches a sinister scheme: hold the cat hostage and assume the owners will post rewards in the newspaper. He pours over a missing-animals article, learning the addresses of the potential owners, as he cackles to his feline partner, “C’mon stupid; this is the payoff!” The dog is ready to cash in on every reward, and the cat becomes a critical pawn in a dangerous game.

To pull off the ruse, the bulldog returns the cat to each owner, collects the promised money, and then reclaims his captive through a trick-bed, presenting a bizarre trophy—the “saber-tooth alley catus”—to the zoo as if it were a hunting prize. This sequence underscores the dog’s gleeful claim that he is now “set for life,” his appetite seemingly insatiable as he buys a butcher shop where “acres and acres” of meat hang from the ceiling.

The story reaches its darkly comic finale in a grimly comic setting: a dog and cat hospital. The bulldog’s greed and gluttony have left him grotesquely obese and immobile, his fate sealed by the consequences of his schemes. Two figures enter the operating room—the cat and the mouse—and the cat, speaking for the only time in the film, menacingly declares, > This time, we didn’t forget the gravy. The dog pleads “no,” but he is powerless to resist as the mouse jams a large funnel into the dog’s mouth and the cat begins force-feeding him a dangerously unhealthy amount of gravy from an institutional-sized canister, ending with the screen iris out over the dog’s choked gurgling as the two former victims finally get their revenge.

Note: One sequence in the film depicted the mouse in makeup that resembled a caricature associated with a Native African savage, and this segment was omitted from some U.S. TV broadcasts in the 1990s.