That Darn Cat!

Sisters Ingrid (Dorothy Provine) and Patti Randall (Hayley Mills) are fending for themselves in the family home in Santa Monica, California while their parents are traveling abroad. Patti's Siamese cat D.C. - short for "Darn Cat" - is a chronic and resourceful explorer, he heading out every night at 9 p.m. in what is usually his successful search for food, with Patti believing he having a standard route through the neighborhood every night. It's after one of D.C.'s night outings that he returns home with what Patti believes is a clue to a criminal case, a two hundred fifty thousand dollar bank robbery where the two masked robbers abducted teller Margaret Miller (Grayson Hall) in the process, she still missing and assumed alive and being held hostage by the robbers. Patti is correct in all of her assumptions. Patti brings her suspicions to the F.B.I., who assigns Agent Zeke Kelso (Dean Jones) to the case. In trying to discover the robbers' hideout and hopefully a still alive Margaret, Zeke and his team have to track D.C. on his night outings to see where he goes. This task may be a difficult one not only because they don't know how effectively to track a cat, especially an independently-minded one like D.C., but because Zeke is allergic to cat hair, something he failed to mention when he joined the agency and something, if known, could mean the end of his career. Who may factor into the investigation more than Zeke would want is Patti, who Ingrid describes as being overly dramatic, and who wants to do her small part in finding Margaret. But as Patti, and eventually Ingrid, try to hide the fact of the F.B.I. being based out of their house in not wanting to tip off any of their activities, they may face the problems of people constantly interested in the goings-on in the Randall house: their nosy and judgmental next door neighbor Mrs. MacDougall (Elsa Lanchester), whose snooping exasperates her husband (William Demarest); Canoe Henderson (Tom Lowell), Patti's surfing-obsessed boyfriend who has had unobstructed access to the Randall kitchen and the abundance of free food in it; and Gregory Benson (Roddy McDowall), the driver of Ingrid's now two person work carpool, Gregory, a mama's boy of a man, who sees Ingrid as his imminent wife regardless of what Ingrid may think. The two robbers - Dan (Neville Brand) and Iggy (Frank Gorshin) - have their own issues in dealing with a nosy landlady, whose primary interest is to get as much financially out of her new tenants as possible.