“I like the dark. It's friendly.”

April 8, 2018 8:55 PM

Cat People: Darkness Betrayed By Geoffrey O’Brien [Criterion] “The premise of Cat People can be simply put: a woman (Simone Simon as Irena Dubrovna, a Serbian artist in exile) is doomed by an ancestral Balkan curse to metamorphose into a panther if aroused by passion, and thus obliged to withhold herself from the man she loves (Kent Smith, as the self-proclaimed “good plain Americano” Oliver Reed). It has the irrational finality of a folktale, an irrationality the film embraces, even as the characters keep it at bay with sage comments about the influence of superstition and the lingering effects of childhood trauma. Cat People is not a movie about the psychological power of folktales; it is itself a folktale.” [YouTube][Trailer]

• ‘Cat People’ and a Gallery of Horror Predators by J. Hoberman [The New York Times]

“The cheerful, staid Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) picks up the strange, enchanting Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), a recent refugee from Serbia whom he finds sketching a panther at the Central Park Zoo. They date, and, despite her superstitious belief that she harbors “something evil,” they eventually wed. When Irena’s fears prevent them from consummating their marriage, Oliver turns first for advice to the psychiatrist Dr. Judd (Tom Conway) and then, for emotional comfort, to his work buddy Alice (Jane Randolph), an all-American type, as normal as he. Shamed and abandoned, Irena begins to disintegrate — or, to put it another way, to experience her inner feline predator. While gripped with sexual repression, Irena carries another burden: She is obsessed with the history of her nation, imagined as a primeval curse. (Earlier versions of DeWitt Bodeen’s screenplay included scenes of Nazi occupation.) Irena cannot escape her past, and she contaminates the optimistic Americans with whom she comes in contact. In the buildup to their agonizing breakup, Oliver blames her for teaching him “unhappiness.” Alice, the healthy homewrecker, is mortally afraid of Irena; the rational, overconfident Dr. Judd should be.”

• Cat People Review by Leo Goldsmith [Not Coming to a Theater Near You]

“Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton’s 1942 classic, Cat People, exploits these fears about “ancient sin” and “corrupt passions” while also making use of popular concerns about the “atavism” of Eastern Europe. Ollie is an exceedingly regular guy, a stranger to unhappiness with an insatiable appetite for good ol’ American apple pie, and so his marriage to the slinky, brooding Irena is doomed from the start. Unable to drop her Serbian superstitions, naturalize, and “lead a normal life,” Irena retreats into herself, denying her husband even the most discreet of smooches. But of course, this prudishness has the adverse effect of driving her husband into the arms of another woman, and therefore, of inflaming Irena’s own feline-female jealousy and rage. The genius of Cat People lies in its deceptive simplicity and its literal and figurative obscurity. The acting is rather cheesy, and the dialogue is often hilariously unsubtle (there’s a cat reference every three minutes), but what seems like a straightforward horror tale of metamorphosis and cruel animalistic drives rarely reveals itself in any obvious way. Simone Simon, in the role of Irena, is always as docile as a kitten, and we are unable to picture her as the savage pantheress she fears herself to be. The film plays a skillful game with its audience, neither fully giving nor withholding an image of the dreaded cat-woman.”

• Cat People Review by Andrea Passafiume [Turner Classic Movies]

“One of Lewton's best suggestive "tricks" that he used in Cat People was the "bus," and it became a staple in his filmmaking style. The term "bus" grew out of the scene in which Alice is stalked through Central Park by an unseen presence at night. The tense scene had Alice walking more and more quickly with the sound of clicking heels following her in the darkness. Whenever Alice stopped, the clicking stopped. There was a conscious decision on Lewton's part to have no music in the scene to help emphasize the dead silence that underscored Alice's fear. As she rushes to a lamp post, a huge bus suddenly pulls into frame with the shrieking sound of its brakes bringing it to a stop in front of her. The unexpected jolt broke the tension of the scene and would later have audiences jumping a mile out of their seats. "To find ever new 'busses' or horror spots, is a horror expert's most difficult problem," said Lewton in a later interview. "Horror spots must be well planned and there should be no more than four or five in a picture. Most of them are caused by the fundamental fears: sudden sound, wild animals, darkness. The horror addicts will populate the darkness with more horrors than all the horror writers in Hollywood could think of."

• Animal Passions: Cat People by Kimberly Lindbergs [Streamline]

“For some viewers, Cat People is simply a brilliant thriller that rewrote the boundaries of horror cinema. For others, it’s an examination of America’s wartime anxieties and escalating xenophobia. Lots of interesting theories and perspectives have been loaded on the broad shoulders of this low-budget RKO production since its release but it’s difficult to overlook the film’s critical take on conventional marriage marred by misplaced passions. In that light, it’s not surprising that some viewers perceived the film as a bold attempt to show the predicament of gay women (and men) at the time who married due to social and religious pressure but could not abide physical contact with the opposite sex. Instead, they longed to be with their attractive feline “sisters” who beckon to them in exotic cafés, provoking sexual frustration and inflaming untapped desires. Bodeen, who was fond of doing deep research for his scripts, may have took inspiration from African folktales that suggested lesbian love-making caused the birth of “cat-people.” And his negative portrayal of psychiatry in the film mirrors the questionable medical practices on homosexuals at the time that led to many gay men and women being forcefully hospitalized and treated with ice pick lobotomies as well as other barbaric “cures” for their perceived “disorder.” Viewers undoubtedly spotted other parallels that suggested there was much more going on beneath the shadow strewn surface of this B-horror film.”

• Cat People: Coding Lesbianism Via Otherness by Elizabeth Erwin [Horror Homeroom]

“Just as in Dracula’s Daughter, the main character of Cat People, Irena Dubrovna, struggles against a part of her true identity she fears will render her an outcast. Irena, a Serbian immigrant, believes she is descended from a cursed tribe in which any woman who has her passions aroused will shape-shift into a killing panther. Irena’s life is complicated when she impulsively marries Oliver, a New York architect. Unable to be intimate with him for fear of the curse, Irena is sent to a psychiatrist in search of a cure. The audience is left guessing whether Irena’s paranoia is the result of sexual repression or whether her fears may be well founded. For Irena to be perceived as a monster, she must be positioned outside of acceptable societal boundaries. One way to achieve this is to pit her differences against the other characters. Robin Wood, in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, defines “Otherness” as that which violates a repressive society. He argues, “All the Others of white patriarchal bourgeois culture-workers, women, gays, blacks-are in various ways threatening, and their very existence represents a demand that society transform itself.”[i] But because Irena’s lesbianism is coded, Cat People must establish her “otherness” in more obvious ways.”

posted by Fizz (16 comments total)

Cat Person 2: Cat People
posted by OverlappingElvis at 9:16 PM on April 8, 2018 [4 favorites]

Val Lewton has been hired by RKO Studios to oversee the creation of their new horror division. However, the job has come with a set of curious conditions...

Having had the name of his first movie, 'Cat People' decided for him in advance, Lewton must assemble a story that fits the title. But perhaps the solution to the problem lies in an almost forgotten story from Lewton's past.

The Secret History of Hollywood series on Val Lewton about the making of Cat People: The Cat Strikes starring Mark Gatiss.
posted by The Whelk at 9:21 PM on April 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

Background music for your reading.
posted by rewil at 10:28 PM on April 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

Seconding the Secret History of Hollywood podcast, though I highly recommend starting with the first episode in the Shadows series: The Boy From The Black Sea (confusingly listed in reverse order on the linked index).

Beyond Cat People, the story of Val Lewton is a fascinating folk tale in itself - - it is also well worth the time to watch the 2007 documentary on Lewton produced and narrated by Martin Scorcese: Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows.

(Note: The 1944 'sequel' imho, The Curse of the Cat People, is even more haunting in it's own offbeat way than the original.)
posted by fairmettle at 10:48 PM on April 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

"Help!, I'm being chased by a panther ..a leopard ....sorry I mean a leopard or maybe a jaguar thing ... no wait... a melantistic jaguar. Its pink ..just kidding black - Serbian probably. May be a straightwashed lesbian."
posted by rongorongo at 10:56 PM on April 8, 2018 [4 favorites]

Alongside 'Get Carter', 'Psycho' and 'The Ring' in a long list of films under the heading 'Why Would You Remake This? What Do You Think You Are Going To Do Better?'
posted by GallonOfAlan at 12:32 AM on April 9, 2018 [4 favorites]

Note: The 1944 'sequel' imho, The Curse of the Cat People, is even more haunting in it's own offbeat way than the original.

One thing I really enjoyed about the sequel is that Elizabeth Russell who had a small but memorable part in Cat People as the woman who approaches Irena at the restaurant saying "Moja Sestra" (My sister) returns in Curse of the Cat People as Barbara Farren, the daughter of the old woman Amy strikes up an unusual friendship with. At first Barbara is harsh to Amy, but Amy sees Irena in Barbara and breaks down the barrier Barbara had erected to maintain her isolation. This brief video from Joe Dante on the trailer of Curse of the Cat People shows the effect and gives some nice background info on that movie.

Cat People is really great, but it might only be my third favorite of the Lewton/Tourneur collaborations since I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man are also phenomenal. Lewton was astonishing and Tourneur brilliant in his own right, and the combination of the two was a bizarre ideal for that strange low budget largely interference free production unit. Both men went on to do some great work with others, but together they made three movies as good as any Hollywood ever put out.

The three movies are often deemed atmospheric horror, enjoyed for their tone and left at that by casual viewers, which is fine of course, but they really do reward more intensive examination as well with each element of the films having purpose and reason that provides a depth to them that wasn't often matched, even by prestige films with many times the budgets. The sorts of progressive values, with attention given to minority perspectives subsumed by the dominant culture is what provides the "atmosphere" so often celebrated. The horror in the films isn't where it might be thought by the names of the movies, but lies in the gulf between the status quo and those outside it, which even the well meaning white men simply can't fully see.

What is spoken of and the perspectives of the men like Oliver in Cat People (or Paul, Wesley and Jerry from the other films) signal the failure to comprehend or even really see what is right in front of them, but the movies provide ample suggestion of it through what they show and what the "secondary" characters say and do. That as much as anything is the horror in these films, that people walk through the world without seeing anything but what they want to see.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:33 AM on April 9, 2018 [11 favorites]

Stack up the Kleenex if you're preparing to watch "Curse of the Cat People" for the first time.

Lewton has a long shadow: I was rewatching Shutter Island the other day and there's at least one explicit nod to "Isle of the Dead". Scorsese is a Lewton fan and I believe he narrated the Lewton doc mentioned above.

Boris Karloff is another Lewton collaborator of note : many feel Karloff did his best work with Lewton. In that vein I'd recommend "Isle of the Dead" and "The Body Snatcher".

I'm glad there's still so much interest in movies from the studio era. I'm also glad I grew up with studio films in constant rotation on the once-great (and once-indie) TV stations of the NYC/Philly area.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 5:33 AM on April 9, 2018 [4 favorites]

Man, this show was in heavy rotation on HBO when I was in my deformative years in the early 80s. I would sneak down late at night and watch this, Excalibur, Altered States, Cat People, Videodrome, and Lair of the White Worm. Over and over again. I was 11 or 12.

I never had a chance.
posted by cjorgensen at 6:10 AM on April 9, 2018 [5 favorites]

cjorgensen, you sure that wasn't the 80s Paul Schrader remake with Nastasia Kinski?
posted by dobbs at 6:32 AM on April 9, 2018 [6 favorites]

Okay, I'm convinced. I'll have to check this out. Seeing the remake with Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell did not exactly fill me with a burning urge to explore its source materials.

Okay, there was one really good thing about it. But that was about the extent of it.
posted by Naberius at 7:05 AM on April 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

The 1982 remake is actually quite good in its own way, which Ebert unpacked well in his review. I saw it young and the ending has haunted me for years; it speaks to a very unsettling and true aspect of patriarchal relationships that still gives me pause.
posted by veery at 8:33 AM on April 9, 2018 [4 favorites]

The 1982 remake is actually quite good in its own way,

Indeed. Forever ago when a friend recommended that I watch Cat People, I accidentally downloaded the wrong one. A few weeks later, I ran into them and it became obvious that we were talking about two very different films. I like it for very different reasons.
posted by Fizz at 9:25 AM on April 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

Background music for your reading.

Foreground music, post-reading
posted by CynicalKnight at 9:33 AM on April 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

Seeing the remake with Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell did not exactly fill me with a burning urge to explore its source materials.

The 1982 movie really ought to be one that was a lot better than it was - even beyond the Bowie/Morodor soundtrack. Paul Shrader's idea for the film seemed to have been initially to do a re-make of the original - and then changed to become a completely separate story - but without taking the final, respectful, step of choosing a different title or character names. Natasha Kinski was a really interesting actor to play Irena: her, apparently abusive, father had achieved fame by playing a vampire , she had been in prison at 15, and she is also a narcoleptic (1999 interview). But rather than make something understated in homage to the original, Shrader seems to have gone in the other direction and chosen explicit gore and Kinski's nudity as the main selling points.

Here is Moviedrome's introduction to the film from back in the day.
posted by rongorongo at 10:59 PM on April 9, 2018

My bad for not following the links. I didn't realize there was an earlier film or that the one I was familiar with was a remake. I will shut up and watch now.
posted by cjorgensen at 9:19 AM on April 10, 2018