CAT PEOPLE (1942)

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Writer: DeWitt Bodeen

Producer: Val Lewton

Cast: Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph, Jack Holt, (and uncredited cast members) Alan Napier, Elizabeth Russell, Alec Craig, Theresa Harris, John Piffle, Dot Farley, Steve Soldi

In New York City’s Central Park Zoo, Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) meets lonely and beautiful Serbian immigrant Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon). They soon fall in love and get married. Unfortunately, Irena is afraid to consummate their marriage because she believes that she is descended from a Serbian race of satanic cat people. She fears that if she has her passions aroused she will transform into a huge cat and kill her lover.

The Flashback Fanatic movie review

When RKO Radio Pictures wanted to pounce on the same audience that made Universal Pictures’ The Wolf Man (1941) a big hit, they figured that a picture with the title of Cat People would grab them. They dumped that derivative title into the lap of their fledgling producer Val Lewton to make a derivative B-film. However, Lewton was a literate and cultured man with no appreciation for the horror film standards set by Universal Pictures. Despite the exploitative title, Lewton set out to make a horror film with a sophisticated and innovative approach.

Val Lewton made me appreciate that a film producer could be much more than just the guy watching the schedule and the budget on a film while kicking the director in the ass. Lewton’s taste and creativity shaped his productions as much as his writers and directors. He contributed story ideas and rewrote scripts.

Above all, Lewton decreed that his horror films would involve the audience by being ambiguous. There was often a decision to be made by the characters and the audience about what the menace was and who or what was to blame. The scares came from within the viewers prompted by the tease of shadows and sounds that could suggest almost anything. Suggestion forced the viewers to pay attention and use their imaginations that involved them more deeply than most other films.

In Cat People Lewton uses a very low-key approach in a slow burn story of marital dysfunction. We are left to figure out if that dysfunction is due to a psychological or supernatural cause. There is no outright villain provided.

As Irena Dubrovna, Simone Simon is quite adorable. She is immediately likable and always sympathetic. Even once we are aware that she may become a menace, we still feel for her. She has been emotionally and psychologically injured through no fault of her own.

Because Simon’s character is so charming, it would be easy to resent Kent Smith’s Oliver Reed. Some people may find him a bit dense as the lucky bum that hooks up with a sweet lady like Irena and can’t deal with her superstitions. That is really not a fair criticism. The horror film audience is primed to accept the possibility of a supernatural menace in a story. Were such a complication to be fixated on by someone in our own relationships, we would want to dismiss that as a fantasy or delusion to reestablish a sense of stability in our lives. Let’s cut Oliver Reed some slack. He does manage to remain chaste in his marriage waiting for his wife Irena to overcome her sexual dread.

However, Oliver does manage to eventually piss us off when he has the thoughtless lapse of letting his gorgeous co-worker Alice Moore (Jane Randolph) in on his marital problems. Despite the fact that she is also in love with Oliver (like I said, he’s a lucky bum), she is such a good sport that she recommends a psychiatrist to help Irena. As Alice says, she’s “the new kind of other woman.” It is a true credit to Randolph’s performance that we still like her Alice character as much as Irena.

A real highlight is the enigmatic cameo by Elizabeth Russell. She seems positively mystical as she disturbs Irena during a brief encounter in a restaurant. As with so many incidents in this film, we can’t put our finger on anything that is truly an indication of danger or evil in this moment, but as horror film patrons we are just as sensitive as Irena to the potential for the sinister.

The one character that seems a bit shifty is the psychiatrist Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway). With his upper crust manner and English accent, he seems a bit removed from the other characters and perhaps a bit too smug. He also lets his libido cross the line in his doctor-patient relationship.

Good performances by the aforementioned actors make the slow build up to the scenes of threat really work. Once we are bonded with these characters and their lives, the scary set pieces succeed because we feel that there is something to lose rather than just a morbid spectacle to witness. The technique used to present the scares relies on suggestion and the unease about a menace that can’t be fully comprehended.

The higher-ups at RKO insisted on a few shots in some scenes to make the menace a bit less ambiguous. There is still plenty left to the imagination and we are teased throughout the first half of the picture wondering just what sort of threat we are dealing with. In some later Lewton flicks, the menace could be soft-pedaled to the point of frustration. I think Cat People has just the right menacing mix of the suggested, the suspected, and the certain. Our perceptions are a bit vague as they are for the film characters, but we are given just enough information to arrive at our own conclusions.

It must be noted that one of Val Lewton’s innovations was introduced in Cat People. It has been dubbed “the bus.” This jump scare technique is usually done with much less finesse these days as the false scares that must punctuate most youth-centric fright flicks between the kills.

Cat People was the first of Val Lewton’s nine RKO horror films of the ’40s that have become classics of the genre. It set out to be a classy counterpoint to the prevailing MO in horror films typified by Universal Pictures. The management of RKO was not happy with Cat People until the cash from the box office started piling up. After a couple of big-budget RKO flops by Orson Welles, Cat People’s huge success on its small investment saved the studio. With its intimacy and sympathetic characters presented in a reserved and moody manner, Cat People demonstrated that there was more than one way for the horror film to skin a cat.