AWARDS AND HONORS

Cat Ballou was nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Actor (Lee Marvin), Best Editing, Best Original Song ("The Ballad of Cat Ballou"), Best Musical Score, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Lee Marvin won for Best Actor.

Lee Marvin won the award for Best Actor at the BAFTA Film Awards, and Tom Nardini (Jackson Two-Bears) was nominated for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles.

Cat Ballou won 3 awards at the Berlin International Film Festival: Lee Marvin won the Silver Berlin Bear as Best Actor, Walter Newman and Frank Pierson won a Special Mention for their screenplay, and director Elliot Silverstein won a Youth Film Award – Honorable Mention for Best Feature Film Suitable for Young People.

Elliot Silverstein received a nomination for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures from the Directors Guild of America (DGA Awards).

The film was nominated for five Golden Globe Awards including Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy (Lee Marvin), Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy (Jane Fonda), Best Original Song ("The Ballad of Cat Ballou") and Most Promising Newcomer – Male (Tom Nardini). Lee Marvin won for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy.

The National Board of Review named Lee Marvin Best Actor for his role in Cat Ballou.

The screenplay for Cat Ballou was nominated for a WGA Award (Writers Guild of America) as the Best Written American Comedy.

Lee Marvin's horse in Cat Ballou, Smoky, won a Craven Award in 1966 for his excellent animal "acting." The Craven Award was named after Richard C. Craven, the first director of the American Humane Association of Hollywood, and is given to animals who demonstrate their skills in supporting roles.

At the end of the 1960s the Los Angeles Times conducted a survey with its readers and Lee Marvin's dual role in Cat Ballou was chosen as their favorite comic performance of the 1960s.

In 2008 the American Film Institute named Cat Ballou number 10 on its list of the 10 Best Westerns of All Time.

Cat Ballou was ranked by the American Film Institute as the 50th Funniest Movie of All Time.

The Critics' Corner: CAT BALLOU

"...a cheerful lampoon of the two-gun horse operas...It is a carefree and clever throwing together of three or four solid Western stereotypes in a farcical frolic that follow-and travesties-the ballad form of Western storytelling made popular in High Noon [1952]...It is fun, broadly played, with Mr. Marvin playing it in the broadest style-so broadly, in fact, that there are moments when it looks as though he is going to spread himself right off the screen."
– The New York Times

"Cat Ballou spoofs the Old West, whose adherents take their likker neat, and emerges middlingly successful, sparked by an amusing way-out approach and some sparkling performances...Fonda delivers a lively interpretation as Cat. Lee Marvin doubles in brass, playing the gunman who shoots down her father and the legendary Kid Shelleen, a terror with a gun, whom she earlier called in to protect her father. In latter character, Marvin is the standout of the picture."
- Variety

"As honest-to-gosh westerns go, Cat Ballou is disgraceful. As a shibboleth-shattering spoof, it dumps all the heroic traditions of horse opera into a gag bag, shakes thoroughly, and pulls out one of the year's jolliest surprises...What's best about it is probably Lee Marvin. Dressed in snaky black, with a silver schnozz tied on where his nose used to be...Marvin soberly parodies several hundred western badmen of yore, then surpasses himself as the dime-novel hero, Kid Shelleen."
- Time Magazine

"But it is Marvin, the wooziest gun in the West, around whom director Elliot Silverstein and producer Harold Hecht have fashioned this splendid film, and every time he hitches up his belt, audiences will hold their sides laughing. He may be a peculiar top gun, but he is natural and assured as the top banana of the old frontier."
- Newsweek

"Most of the time it's funny, and some of the time it's sad, but the nice thing about Cat Ballou...is that it isn't always quite sure which...There is so much to enjoy in Cat Ballou, especially the consistently inventive script and Lee Marvin's virtuoso performance, that it seems a little invidious to say that Elliot Silverstein's direction is not always as sure as it might be."
- Sight and Sound

"What distinguishes Cat Ballou is that in this Western to destroy our faith in Westerners, nobody is camping, nobody's tongue-in-cheeking and spitballing around. In the title role Jane Fonda is as sweet and pure and earnest as any schoolmarm turned gang leader and man-killer-and it's not her fault that when she slowly canters away astride her horse the one fleeting rear view director Elliot Silverstein permits us makes Miss Jane in her riding clothes infinitely sexier than Miss Andress in bikini ad infinitum. And Lee Marvin-who runs off with the picture and, if there is justice in the contemporary Far West, an Oscar in his dual role of Tim Straun (sic), the silver-nosed evil gunslinger, and Kid Shelleen, the last alcohol-preserved good gunslinger-doesn't yield by the glitter of an eye...It's satire of the keenest kind, deadpan-delicious."
– Judith Crist

"A self-consciously cute parody western...There are occasional good lines and some nice things: Nat King Cole singing "They'll Never Make Her Cry"; Lee Marvin's ritual preparations for a gunfight; Marvin mistaking funeral candles for birthday celebration. But mainly it's full of sort-of-funny and trying-to-be-funny ideas. The director Elliot Silverstein's spoofy tone is ineptitude, coyly disguised."
- Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies
"The film presents such a mixture of comedy styles that the more lumpen slapstick routines, and the cozy musical interludes from Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye, may lull you into overlooking some brilliant throwaways. Marvin is consistently brilliant, but the film is patchy."
- TimeOut Film Guide

"Sometimes lively, sometimes somnolent Western spoof which considering the talent involved should have been funnier than it is. The Linking ballad helps."
- Halliwell's Film & Video Guide

"Cat Ballou satirizes just about everything and if you blink you may miss a good gag, but it's not overblown like The Hallelujah Trail [1965] or tasteless like There Was a Crooked Man [1970] or anachronistic like Blazing Saddles [1974]; it doesn't strain for laughs - it merely earns them....Marvin is magnificent (and incredibly funny)...And his drunken horse is great, too."
- Brian Garfield, Western Films

"Fonda (so young and with such big hair) is spunky enough to carry the film, but it is Marvin who steals the show in the double role that earned him an Oscar. The other great joy of this film is the music. Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye (as the occidental answer to a Greek chorus) turn up throughout the film to move the story along with ballads in the great western tradition."
- Alison Dalzell, Edinburgh University Film Society

Compiled by Andrea Passafiume