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CAT PEOPLE
Rating:  ½
USA. 1982.
Director – Paul Schrader, Screenplay – Alan Ormsby, Based on the 1942 Film Written by DeWitt Bodeen, Producer – Charles Fries, Photography – John Bailey, Music – Giorgio Moroder, Visual Effects – Max Anderson & Albert Whitlock, Makeup – Tom Burman, Production Design – Edward Richardson & Fernando Scarfiotti. Production Company – Universal/RKO.
Cast:
Nastassia Kinski (Irena Gallier), Malcolm McDowell (Paul Gallier), John Heard (Oliver Yates), Annette O’Toole (Alice Perrin), Ruby Dee (Female)
Plot: Irena Gallier arrives in New Orleans to visit her brother Paul whom she hasn’t seen since childhood. But she is repelled when Paul starts to make sexual advances to her. He reveals to her that they are the last two members of a race that was cursed long ago for practicing human sacrifice and that they can only mate with each other. Sex with humans causes them to transform into panthers, a condition that can only be remedied by the shedding of human blood.
Cat People (1942) is one of the great genre classics. It was a landmark that revolutionized the horror film. The ingenuity of producer Val Lewton’s approach was to effectively hide the monster behind a shadow of doubt and to play a game of peekabo between rationalism and edgy nightmarishness, with the whole film straddling a line that sat just between the two. The monsters in Lewton’s films were creatures of imagination and superstition, they were never depicted – all that we saw of the cat people were looming shadows and the rest could have been people’s imaginations. It was an approach that Lewton made a trademark with his subsequent films (see the above Cat People link for a listing).
The Cat People remake had been tossed around as a project since around 1978. What gave it the impetus to become actuality was the success of The Howling (1980) and An American Werewolf in London (1981). These pioneered a brief-lived fad for air-bladder transformation effects where we saw people transforming into werewolves and the like in prodigious real-time detail with fur growing and joints and snouts popping out. Unfortunately this proved the death knell for the Lewtonian approach. In the remake all ambiguity and doubt has been thrown out the window – now there is no doubt about whether the Cat People do really exist – we see Malcolm McDowell and Nastassia Kinski transforming in great detail. There is nothing in this film that exists in any state of doubt or ambiguity. The film repeats classic scenes from the original – the scene where Alice goes swimming alone at night and a big cat seems to wander into the pool area; the scene where the fleeing Irena imagines something pursuing her and a bus slams into screen in front of her in a jolting hiss of brakes – but to negligible effect. This film lacks anything of the original’s eerieness or black-and-white shadowiness.
The film has also become a good deal more sexually overt. In the original there was the underlying suggestion that Irena’s belief in cat people could have been caused by her fears of sexual consummation. The remake is directed by Paul Schrader, a filmmaker who comes from a Calvinist background. Schrader’s films always feature torn individuals tormented between sexual desire and morality – there was Hardcore (1975) about a Calvinist who enters into an underworld of pornography and prostitution searching for his missing daughter; Taxi Driver (1976) about a mentally restless Vietnam vet trying to reclaim morality in a world of Times Square vice; Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) the true story of a gay Japanese poet who committed ritual suicide as a statement about loss of honour; The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) where we saw a Jesus Chris who was torn between love and martyrdom; and Auto Focus (2002) about the sexual compulsions of actor Bob Crane. Not surprisingly, divided sexuality becomes a major feature of the remake with Irena being a virgin who is, in almost hysterical symbolic overkill, likely to turn into a ravening black panther if she has sex.
On its own terms, Cat People 1982 is unevenly well made. The photography is smoulderingly beautiful – particularly intoxicating is a scene with Nastassia Kinski hunting, which is seen from the cat’s point-of-view. Giorgio Moroder’s eerily atonal score and David Bowie’s memorable title track makes for one of the most listenable of all movie soundtracks. Not to mention the lovely Nastassia Kinski who manages to suggest a lithely coiled kitten in every movement she makes. Together they and Schrader create an atmosphere that is consistently evocative and sensually charged. But also the film falls into unevenness. It is overlong and many scenes where Schrader tries to opt for shock – a rather exactingly gory but unnecessary scene where a zoo keeper’s arm is torn off by the panther – emerge clumsily.
Paul Schrader’s other films of genre interest are:– the screenplays for Martin Scorsese’s mesmerizing urban psychosis films Taxi Driver (1976) and Bringing Out the Dead (1999) amd the screenplay for Brian De Palma’s reincarnation thriller Obsession (1976). As director Schrader has also made the psycho-sexual thriller The Comfort of Strangers (1990); the tv movie Witch Hunt (1994) set in an alternate world where magic works; the faith healer film Touch (1997); and Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist (2005). Screenwriter Alan Ormsby has written a number of films, including two horror films for Bob Clark, Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972) and Dead of Night/Deathdream (1972), which he also contributed the makeup effects for, and also co-directed the excellent Ed Gein biopic Deranged (1974).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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