dir Jacques Tourneur lp Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph, Tom Conway
This is one of a series of horror films produced by Val Lewton for RKO Studies in the mid-1940s. In the wake of Universal's success with gothic horror films starting in 1931, RKO executives gave audience-tested titles to Lewton and assigned him to make films to fit them. Instead of the exploitation period pieces the studio was expecting, Lewton made literate, restrained films with contemporary settings using actors not associated with horror. They are remembered today as some of the best horror films ever made (RKO eventually forced Lewton to use Boris Karloff for three period-set horror films - they were also excellent).
Cat People is at the top of the list. Irina Dubrovna (Simon), a fashion artist and Serbian immigrant living in New York, has a meet-cute with architect Oliver Reed (Smith), while she is sketching a black panther at the Central Park Zoo. She is attracted to the ruggedly handsome Oliver, and he is entranced by her beauty and exotic accent (Simon was actually French). When she invites him to her apartment for tea, he finds she has something of a morbid streak. Among the cat-themed decor (which also includes Goya's painting Don Manuel Osorio, with three cats hungrily eyeing a canary) is a statue of a knight on horseback holding aloft a sword with a cat impaled on it. Irinia explains that this is King John of Serbia, who freed the area from the Turks, but discovered that the formerly Christian villagers in Irina's ancestral region had fallen into devil worship. Although King John executed most of the satanists, some of them escaped into the mountains. Their descendants transform into panthers when aroused by anger, jealousy, or sexual passion.
As time passes, Oliver falls more deeply in love with Irina, despite the fact that she believes that if she surrenders to her desire for him, she will transform and kill him. The two are married, but at their wedding dinner at a Serbian restaurant a strange women in black (Elizabeth Russell), approaches Irina, greeting her as "sister." A month into their marriage, with Irina still refusing physical intimacy, Oliver arranges for Irina to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Judd (Conway). He tells her that her belief in cat people is a delusion that she must overcome, but she refuses to see him again. Meanwhile, the unhappy Oliver grows closer to Alice, a woman in his office with whom he has a long-standing platonic friendship. Irina's jealousy at their relationship threatens to spark the transformation that she has feared.
Cat People remains a master class in restrained film-making. Lewton believed that nothing that he could show on screen would be superior to what the viewer's imagination could concoct, so their are no transformation scenes. Lewton apparently intended never to show Irina in her panther form, but the studio forced him to include a brief shot of an actual panther prowling around Oliver and Alice's office, frightening them when they are working late. The are two justly famous scenes that illustrated Lewton's preferred approach. In the first, Alice is walking home late at night, when she gradually becomes aware that she is being stalked; she senses something moving through the vegetation nearby. She (and the viewer) is startled by a loud, catlike hiss, but it turns out to be only a bus pulling up to her bus stop. After she leaves, the camera reveals that four sheep have been killed nearby and we see a series of muddy footprints that gradually transform from feline paws to high-heeled shoes. In the other scene, Alice is swimming in a lonely basement pool at the YMCA, when she begins to hear catlike growls and hisses around the edge of the pool. Treading water, she looks anxiously around, but cannot see what is making the noise. The tension mounts until she begins to scream, her voice bouncing off the walls enclosing the pool and merging with the cat sounds, until someone flips on the light and it's Irina, in human form, calmly asking Alice if she knows where Oliver is. Her knowing smile hints that she enjoyed her romantic rival's panic.
Cat People is a masterpiece of subtle horror, where everything seems normal at first, but we gradually realize that something is wrong. I really enjoy this approach, in both cinema and literature, so this is one of my favorite horror films. Some critics and writers about film have gone a bit too far, however, and claimed that the reality of Irina's condition is supposed to be ambiguous, that the viewer is not supposed to know if Irina actually transforms into a cat, or is simply experiencing a delusion. I agree with film writer Jonathan Rigby, in his great American Gothic, that this is nonsense. Even if we discount the studio-mandated scene of a real cat, there is plenty of evidence that Lewton and screenwriter Dewitt Bodeen meant to establish that Irina literally does turn into a panther.
Forty years after this film, a violent and sexy remake, also called Cat People, directed by Paul Schrader and starring Nastassja Kinski, Malcom McDowell, and John Heard was released. It is of some interest, but is not deserving of the original's classic status.
