Historically, movies about home invaders and the families they terrorize are rare, but hardly unheard-of.  William Wyler’s The Desperate Hours (1955) was a big hit in its time and was a reliable part of Bogie retrospectives.  The ongoing confrontation between family head Fredric March and gang boss Humphrey Bogart set a structural template that survived in one way or another all the way through Larry Cohen’s Bone.  Or the Ted Demme 1994 comedy The Ref, for that matter.

            Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), John McNaughton’s brilliant and disturbing thriller, changed the landscape somewhat, though it was so uniquely masterful that its influence was limited by its sheer inimitability.  But, undoubtedly, it made possible Michael Haneke’s largely identical Funny Games movies, the first made in Austria in 1997, the second in the U.S. in 2007.  (I can’t help mentioning that Haneke’s films are most properly regarded as second-rate giallos tarted up to look like “art.”)  Here the invaders became the foreordained destroyers of the families they subdue.

            Fons Rademaker’s Because of the Cats (1973) gains some interest largely by striking a few unusual attitudes towards the material.  In doing so, it becomes a poignant cry from the heart of the enlightened European middle classes, people who remember the run-up to World War II and who are dismayed by the hostility and violence of young people.  The movie is even sourced in that most reassuring of middle-class art forms, the police detective story.  Rademakers, working with the leftist screenwriter and novelist Hugo Claus, adapted the screenplay from a book by the English crime writer, Nicholas Freeling.  Freeling had lived for a while in Amsterdam, where he had been arrested and questioned by a Dutch detective.  In turn, the writer used his interrogator as the model for Inspector van der Valk, the hero of a critically and popularly hailed series of books.  Mimicking the books’ dual nationalities, Rademakers filmed the movie on location in Amsterdam with a Dutch crew and a partly English cast.

            The movie lands its hardest punch first, opening in a middle-class household in the process of being trashed by a group of adolescents dressed in identical dark suits and masks.  When the middle-aged couple who own the place show up unexpectedly, the invaders (they’re not burglars; they’re out to destroy, not steal) immediately ripping the clothes off the woman and gang-raping her in front of her timid husband.  Rademakers films the stripped woman in a variety of positions that suggest the poses of models in girlie magazines (as opposed to hard-core porn), without undermining the horror of what’s going on.  It’s possible, even likely, that Rademakers is forcing the audience to confront its titillation over the nudity in a supposedly repulsive setting, but he only resorts to the technique one more time.  Although that second scene raises the stakes, it’s not clear whether the director was developing an idea or just repeating a device.

            After the opening, the movie proceeds along two tracks aided by some judicious cross-cutting and flashbacks.  Van der Valk (Bryan Marshall), who turns out to be resentfully class-conscious, temporarily moves to a well-to-do suburb where he figures the youthful gang originates.  He couples up with a “classy” prostitute (Alexandra Stewart) by night, and during the day tracks down the suspected kids, a job which goes pretty smoothly.  Meanwhile, we also get a look at the fair-faced, but ruthless malefactors, their social sub-structure, and the above-board side of their lives.  We also get to hear what the title means.

            Without going into detail, let’s say that the film is ultimately about crypto-fascism and how it camouflages subjugation as freedom.  In a lurid and frightening scene which embodies this idea the best, a teenage girl (Sylvia Kristel, a before her first Emmanuelle movie) takes her boyfriend to the beach for some skinny dipping.  To the boy’s delight, they’re joined by a half-dozen other girls, but once in the water, sexual license turns into something far more deadly.

            Rademakers keeps his doctrinaire voice in check; it rarely rises above a murmur and then nearly always through the mouth of only one character.  Superficially, but also concretely, Because of the Cats is a decent police thriller with some great scenes and some interrupted development.  But it’s unified by a vivid fear that young minds can be corrupted by youth itself and that there’s much to be said for capping desire with tight lids, even if those lids are tied down with something as tawdry as money.