Track of the Cat’s Bezzerides Dies

A.I. Bezzerides, 98, a novelist-turned-screenwriter best known for post-World War II film noir classics such as Kiss Me Deadly, On Dangerous Ground and Thieves’ Highway , died January 1, 2007, after a brief illness.

Albert Isaac Bezzerides was born Aug. 9, 1908, in Samsun, Turkey. His mother was Armenian and his father a Turkish-speaking Greek. He moved to America with his parents by age 2, and they settled in Fresno, where his father worked in the fields before becoming a produce-hauling trucker.

He is perhaps most remembered for a style he applied to his best-remembered work, the 1938 novel Long Haul , which became the 1940 movie They Drive by Night , starring George Raft and Bogart. A tale of sleepless, crash-haunted drivers, it was a box-office success and became a cult classic.

Bezzerides, nicknamed Buzz, wrote or co-wrote films such as Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, Desert Fury , Sirocco and Track of the Cat.

The 1954 film Track of the Cat was certainly cryptozoological on some levels. It deals with the character Curt Bridges (Robert Mitchum) tracking down the panther that killed his brother Arthur (William Hopper). As the marketing for this film mentions, this movie was “noted for its subdued color cinematography and psychological subtexts, director William Wellman’s compelling frontier drama is set in a snowbound farmhouse in 1880s northern California. As jealousies and rivalries tear at the family members trapped inside, a deadly panther waits out in the wilderness.”

But it’s setting in northern California did not mean it could not be a metaphor for others seeking hard-to-find cats or the monsters outside.

In Illinois, in the 1960s, this film was often shown as a television movie around the times when there was a series of sightings of panthers. The encounters of the mystery cat kind would come first, and one got the sense that the local station’s programmers were leasing the film to take advantage of the flaps going on locally.

Weathermen (there were no weatherwomen back in the early 1960s on most stations) would discuss the “mystery panther” sightings with the news broadcasters. Sometimes they would tell viewers about the books they were reading and the viewers should read on the subject. This is how I first learned of Bruce S. Wright’s Ghost of North America, which focussed on the sightings of cryptid eastern panthers.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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