| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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CAT PEOPLE
Rating:  ½
USA. 1942.
Director – Jacques Tourneur, Screenplay – DeWitt Bodeen, Producer – Val Lewton, Photography (b&w) – Nicholas Musuraca, Music – Roy Webb, Art Direction – Albert S. D’Agostino & Walter E. Keller. Production Company – RKO.
Cast:
Simone Simon (Irena Dubrovna), Kent Smith (Oliver Reed), Jane Randolph (Alice Moore), Tom Conway (Dr Lewis Judd)
Plot: Architect Oliver Reed falls in love with beautiful Irena Dubrovna and they duly marry. But Irena refuses to give herself to Oliver, believing that there is something evil inside herself. She tells him of her Serbian ancestors who were reputed to be able to transform into cats when angered. As Oliver’s frustration and unhappiness grows, he seeks consolation in the arms of co-worker Alice Moore. But a series of near-attacks on the two of them leave him wondering either if Irena has not become jealously deranged or if maybe her Serbian legends are true and that she is turning into a cat person to avenge herself on them.
Cat People is a classic. It was the first film from producer Val Lewton at RKO Radio Pictures. With Cat People, Lewton essentially created a new type of horror film – the psychological horror film. And in so doing Lewton ended completely changing approaches to the horror film. In synopsis Cat People could be any of a dozen similarly minded B-programmer werewolf variations of the same decade. The crucial difference was in Val Lewton’s approach to horror. Lewton took any overt manifestation of the supernatural away from the audience. The approach that became a dictum to his writers and directors relied upon casting doubt, both for the characters and audience, upon whether or not the supernatural menace was real or something imagined. Whether or not Simone Simon is a were-feline or merely imagining it, the film here is cleverly ambiguous about, even at the very end. Certainly no were-cat is ever seen – much growling is heard and the shadow of something is briefly glimpsed prowling through Kent Smith’s office, but that could always be the panther from the zoo to whose cage Simone Simon stole the key. Even cleverer is a subtext of explanation offered by psychologist Tom Conway that all but outrightly states that Irena’s belief that she is a were-feline could as much be a delusion caused by an extreme fear of sex.
The actual suspense scenes are structured with a careful ambiguity. There’s the classic scene where Simone Simon pursues Jane Randolph where in Randolph’s imagination Simon’s footsteps appear to become an animal chasing her. The scene builds with such a sense of foreboding as to what is following her. Director Jacques Tourneur carefully misdirects us to look behind Jane Randolph throughout so that when a bus slams into the foreground with a hiss of brakes it is a genuine jolt. And then there’s the celebrated swimming pool scene that creates the sensation of something present amid the rippling light reflected on the ceiling – nothing is ever shown, only suggested by growling noise and the suggestion of a shape prowling down the stairs. It’s not a hugely subtle scene, but it does contribute entirely to the haunted mood of Cat People, an atmosphere that seems to derive in large part from having every set light placed at ankle-height pointing upwards. Indeed director Jacques Tourneur creates such a remarkably haunted mood that even a revolving door left slightly rotating is made to suggest something.
Undeniably Cat People has dated. Certainly few of those raised in the Freddy Krueger generation have the patience to sit through the slow-moving opening and the sometimes awkward acting. But that isn’t important. This is a horror film for thinking people.
The Curse of the Cat People (1944) was a nominal sequel, a title that was forced on Val Lewton by RKO. This features Kent Smith, Jane Randolph and Simone Simon’s ghost, but is otherwise an excellent psychological ghost story that has nothing to do with cat people and is actually about a lonely girl developing what may or may not be a ghost companion. Cat People (1982) was a remake from Paul Schrader that disappointingly dispensed with all the Lewtonian psychological ambiguity and features elaborate upfront human-feline transformation effects and much erotic content, although is not an entirely uninteresting effort.
Val Lewton’s other horror films are:– I Walked With a Zombie (1943), The Ghost Ship (1943), The Leopard Man (1943), The Seventh Victim (1943), Isle of the Dead (1945), The Body Snatcher (1945) and Bedlam (1946). Lewton’s approach of psychological rather than actual horror elements has been influential on a number of other films including the Jungle Woman series starring Acquanetta as a were-ape that began with Captive Wild Woman (1943) and other films like The Catman of Paris (1946), She-Wolf of London (1946), The Beast With Five Fingers (1947), Cult of the Cobra (1955), Night of the Demon/Curse of the Demon (1957) and The Haunting (1963).
Director Jacques Tourneur next directed Val Lewton’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943) and The Leopard Man (1943), the abovementioned Night of the Demon/Curse of the Demon (1957), as well as the Grand Guignol comedy The Comedy of Terrors (1963) and the lost city sf film The City Under the Sea/War Gods from the Deep (1965).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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