Claws For Alarm (aka They Stab It With Their Steely Knives But They Just Can't Kill The Beast)

Chuck Jones' 1948 short Scaredy Cat was a dark and disturbing tour de force that created gold through the unlikely pairing of a rightfully paranoid Sylvester and a hopelessly obtuse Porky. In spite of (or maybe because of) how beautifully their partnership had played out, it took Jones six years to revisit the formula and create a sequel that explored the further possibilities of the Sylvester/Porky dynamic. Claws For Alarm arrived in 1954, and was followed by a third and final installment, Jumpin' Jupiter, in 1955. The Sylvester and Porky Trilogy of Terror (as I am henceforth calling it) make up some of my very favourite Looney Tunes cartoons, because they manage to build and sustain a genuinely unsettling atmosphere amid all the usual zany antics (although Jumpin' Jupiter much less than the other two). They are little slices of nightmare fuel, and they are, to my eye, to be appreciated as much for their horror value as for their colourful mayhem.

It's easy to be dismissive of Claws For Alarm, because it sticks so closely to the formula of Scaredy Cat that it is essentially a remake, with Sylvester and Porky once again attempting to spend the night in a secluded venue and blundering into the lair of a swarm of discreetly homicidal mice. Sylvester very quickly cottons onto the unholy aura of the place, while Porky insists on remaining and endangering them both with his idiocy. Inevitably, the night gives way to an avalanche of tensions, with Porky just wanting a restful night's sleep and Sylvester desperately trying to ensure that the two of them live to see the morning. There are familiar story beats, such as Sylvester confirming his ostensible cowardice by overreacting to some perfectly harmless creature at the start of the short (a bat in the original, here a spider who casts a long shadow) and his every effort to foil the attempts on Porky's life being invariably misconstrued by his porcine master. Claws, though, is no lazy retread, but instead a credible attempt on Jones' part to revisit the scenario from a fresh new angle, exploring alternate ways of conveying the murid menace and, finally, yielding the opportunity to settle on a completely direction in which the long dark night could potentially have gone (that last point is very important, because the only area in which Scaredy Cat arguably faltered was in its rather baffling choice of final punchline). The short ends up having its own completely different look, tone and atmosphere, and while I wouldn't say that it strikes quite the same chord as its predecessor, it's still a well-made follow-up that captures that same crucial essence of ghastly desolation.

The circumstances of the protagonists' stay have been tweaked slightly. In Scaredy Cat, Porky had actually purchased the house, but here the characters are on a road trip and happen across a ghost town. Porky fails to grasp that the buildings are all abandoned ("I love how early people go to bed in these country towns") and figures that the ominously-named Dry Gulch Hotel is the perfect stopping point for overnight accommodation, unaware that it's really crawling with the stab-happy vermin. The inert and deserted town is suggestive of its own highly disturbing backstory, with implications potentially even more morbid than those of Scaredy Cat, where the fate of the previous residents was signified in the image of their cat being wheeled away to its doom. It leaves itself open to two possible interpretations - either the mice took up residence after the people moved out, or (and this does seem like the more compelling explanation) the town was emptied by a killing spree the mice went on some time ago. The possibility that these proficient killers are lurking in every local building, and not just the Dry Gulch, is not explored but we certainly feel as though we've only scratched the surface of the horrors that have befallen this quaint country town.

Animation budgets were already not what they were in 1948, and Claws For Alarm is unable to recreate the same dense, murky atmosphere as the house in Scaredy Cat, but what it comes up with in its place is every bit as inventive, in ways that seem practically designed to engineer an aesthetic that is the polar opposite of Scaredy Cat. Scaredy Cat was all about the ominous blackness of the house, and the parts that were so badly lit one could shudder at the mere thought of what they might be obscuring. Claws, on the other hand, is all about brightness and colour. The red and green walls of the Dry Gulch and even the purple shadows that are always cast across them have a gaudy, vibrant look that in practice turns out to be no more reassuring. In place of the deep, dark patches of nothing that filled up the property in Scaredy Cat, dread is created by the imposing, slightly surreal manner in which the shadows span the hotel interior - in particular, the two crossed lines that stretch above Porky's bed looking like the threads of a spider's web, or alternatively two blades waiting to drop. The walls, meanwhile, have the authentically vulgar look of the kind of cheap decor you might expect to encounter in a low-grade hotel, a stark veneer that barely conceals the plethora of horrors stirring underneath.

Although the mice in Claws obey much the same rules as the mice in Scaredy Cat, in that they remain offscreen for most of the short, emerging only periodically to attack the heroes and disappearing almost instantly, here Jones seems all the more determined to minimise their appearances, thus keeping their presence as incorporeal as possible. For the most part the mice are represented as pairs of terrible yellow-green eyes peering out from the ominous black voids dotted all over the hotel; greater emphasis is placed on the nooks and crannies aspect of the first film, where we felt certain that the mice were constantly present, observing and plotting their next move, even when they could be neither seen or heard. Occasionally, they appear in silhouette, such as when Porky and Sylvester first enter the hotel and the outlines of four mice are seen huddling together in a distinctly conspiratorial fashion. Elsewhere, there is a clever sight gag where Sylvester is forced out into the corridor by Porky and sees what appears to be a spindly ghost waltzing by, but when the "ghost" passes a window, the moonlight reveals the forms of several mice stacked atop one another beneath a bedsheet. (I'm actually not clear on why the mice disguise themselves as a ghost, other than to facilitate this gag, as it serves no obvious purpose in their murder scheme - unless it is simply a matter of giving Sylvester an additional scare, suggesting that they're sadistic as well as cut-throat). There is only one instance in the full cartoon where we see a mouse in plain view, which I'll admit I have very mixed feelings on. On the one hand, the creature looks sufficiently unfriendly (particularly if you hit the pause button at just the right moment and see the blood lust in its eyes, good gravy), but I also feel this is the one point where Claws succumbs to the sin of overstatement, however fleetingly. There were several instances in Scaredy Cat in which the mice were clearly seen, but their ill intentions weren't advertised so explicitly in their character designs. By comparison, they had a very generic cartoon mouse look, which gave them an eerie incongruity; seemingly ordinary mice with seriously sick inclinations. The mice in Claws are all the more mysterious (unlike their counterparts in Scaredy Cat, who appear to kill ritualistically, we don't get any insight into what motivates their butcherous behaviour), and I think they work better when they are allowed to remain incorporeal. This enables them to take on an almost supernatural air, causing them to feel less like a particularly troublesome rodent infestation than a malignant curse that devours everything that makes contact with it, a sensation borne out by the implications of the short's wickedly inspired ending.

It's in the ending that Claws For Alarm diverges most significantly from its predecessor. Whereas Scaredy Cat built to a cathartic, borderline heart-warming climax in which Sylvester escapes the mice but finding himself unable to abandon Porky, heads back into the house and confronts the rodents head-on, Claws For Alarm goes in more-or-less the opposite direction. Here, Sylvester eventually tires of Porky's obtuseness and is driven to violence against the very individual he's been striving to protect this whole time (I doubt that anybody could fault Sylvester for doing so). The following morning (if you're familiar with the original, then the fact that dawn comes at all and that Porky makes it through the night with relatively few disturbances plays like a gag in itself), Porky is so satisfied with his experience that he proposes they settle here for a few more days, at which point a sleep-deprived Sylvester decides to take control of the situation, knocking Porky senseless with the blunt end of a shotgun, hauling him onto the backseat of the car and hitting the gas pedal pronto. As the cursed town fades into the distance, Sylvester breathes a heavy sigh of relief, thinking that he's ditched those mice for good, but a final visual punchline reveals multiple pairs of eyes staring out at him from the dark cracks of the speedometer. In this version of the story, Sylvester tries fleeing his demons instead of facing them, and discovers that they won't be eluded that easily. The lack of a catharsis on the level of Scaredy Cat will inevitably prove unsatisfying for some, but Claws does manage to avoid the one false step in Scaredy Cat, ie: its closing gag, a transparent case of Jones not knowing how to end the short and resorting to a stock Looney Tunes punchline (confoundingly so, and to a point that threatens to undermine the masterfully-sustained horror of the preceding seven minutes). Claws For Alarm, on the other hand, produces an ending that is witty, logical and entirely true to the horror ambience. Naturally, there is a haunting symbolism in that final image, with the speedometer, charting Sylvester's acceleration away from the dreaded Dry Gulch, also concealing the horrors that are to come later on down the road, a discomforting reminder that the traumas of the night, one way or another, will be with our hero for a while yet. It's deliciously unnerving, and such is the power of those rancid green peepers, you can feel them bearing on you long after the fade-out.