The RKO team comprised of director Jacques Tournear (Night of the Demon, I Walked with a Zombie), screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen (his first script), and producer Val Lewton created with Cat People what is considered by many to be the epitome of understatement in cinema. This was largely due to their 118,948-dollar budget (which returned four-million), but also owed to the fact that the trio understood the anatomy of horror. This said, I will acknowledge Cat People as great in several respects but cannot consent to the glowing accolades the film has received overall. The work is an admirable study in horror, subtlety, and feminism but these strengths run astride a handful of depreciating faults.
Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) meets an introverted Serbian fashion artist named Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) at a New York zoo as she sketches rough outlines of a panther. He becomes fascinated with her and the two quickly marry. Oliver patiently restrains his frustrations after Irena refuses to consummate the marriage due to her belief that she is descended from a line of ancient people who, when the females of the bloodline become sexually aroused or jealous, they transform into panthers which aggressively act upon their emotions. At Oliver’s behest, Irena visits a psychiatrist, Louis Judd (Tom Conway), but refuses his logistic dismissals of her lineage as mere regression atop his unethical sexual advances. After sustaining a month of platonic matrimony, Oliver confides in his coworker, Alice Moore (Jane Randolph), which enrages Irena once she discovers her confidence has been betrayed. As Oliver and Alice’s relationship develops upon her disclosure of her love for him, Irena’s rage incubates as she fears the wrath of the curse about to descend upon those around her.
First, the film is outstanding in its presentation of a chilling portrait of fear in three particular scenes, none of which depict blood or onscreen violence. As Alice walks down an alley on her way home after meeting Oliver, she fears something or someone following her. The manner in which the scene is filmed is masterful in the way it creates and mounts tension, cutting between frames in relation to the soundtrack. Next, Alice is enclosed in a public swimming pool and, primarily due to the cinematography (Nicholas Musuraca), editing (Mark Robson) and sound (John Cass), the scene evokes a primal sense of dread. Lastly, as Louis makes his final advance upon Irena, having kissed her against her wishes, he knocks over a lamp with projects the outline of his struggle with a panther against the far wall of the room as the fight takes place off screen.
The subtlety with which the themes are presented is ingenious. Obviously, Irena must be a brunette to parallel her kinship with the panther while her antagonist, Alice, is blonde. Their characters are consequently cast in shadow and light respectively. Also, the feline premise reappears in the characters’ wardrobes, gifts, pets, paintings, and terminology, all of which loom menacingly over the frames in which they appear. Early in the film, the malevolence that is to be associated with the figure of the panther is established in the zoo keeper’s (Alec Craig) assessment of the animal, “[ . . . ] where the book’s [the Bible] talkin’ about the worst beast of ’em all. It says, ‘And the Beast which I saw was like unto a leopard.’ Like a leopard, but not a leopard. I guess that fits this feller.” Cunningly, Alice and Oliver are discreetly implied to be engaging in sexual relations, thus compounding the theme of female sexuality and its predatory nature, in that the couple are often seen sharing cigarettes when alone (thus allowing Oliver’s ready acceptance of his wife’s sexual reserve to be believable).
Yet, my problem with the film is Tournear’s use of metaphor. When a film presents a metaphor, it must not be arbitrary, otherwise the technique is merely stylistic gratuity. In Cat People, the director establishes a correlation between female sexuality and felines. Initially, I thought that the creators of the film had misapplied their symbolism because they emphasize Alice’s nontraditional role as a female, moreso than Irena’s plight (atypical ideas–the “outsider”–are characteristically cast in the genre during this time as the monster then presented in a sympathetic light): she courts a married man, refuses to be escorted home, and states that, “I’m a new type of woman.” Yet, early in the film, at the newlywed’s reception party, a cat-like woman (Elizabeth Russell, credited as “The Cat Woman”) approaches Irena and speaks to her in her native language, referring to her as “Sister.” Thus, the frigidity of Irena can be seen as an apologetic representation of lesbianism in that Irena fears her urges and desires as such due to their potential consequences if acted upon. From this perspective, Irena refers to her past as being comprised of “evil things.” This theme is further reinforced by Irena’s disclosure, while under hypnosis, to Louis that her father died mysteriously while her mother was ostracized in her village as being a cat woman (thus, only women are prone to the emotional affliction). In the establishing scenes of the film, we watch as Irena takes Oliver back to her apartment after meeting him seconds before as she confides that he might be her “first real friend.” Lastly, and perhaps most effectively to this thematic end, phallic objects appear forebodingly throughout the film: Louis threatens to defend himself against Irena with a cane which contains a hidden blade, a statue in Irena’s apartment depicts a knight impaling a panther, and Louis waves a lit cigarette at Irena after she refuses to concede to his theory that her unwillingness to avail herself to Oliver is nonsensical.
My other quibbles with the film, minor compared to the restricted readings of the work, begin with the ending. However truthful, it is excessively pessimistic in that it permits the bigotry, misogyny, and xenophobia witnessed during the film to exit virtually unabated: the un-“Americano” (Oliver’s term) figure of Irena is justly usurped as the steadfast, upright characters (that is, surface readings of the characters as they present themselves to others in the film) walk away to better advantage then when they entered. Given the time of the production, the envelope couldn’t be pushed too far (the censors had issue, not with the violence or thematic content, but rather the male lead’s proclivity to drink hard liquor) yet Tournear and Lewton allow such mentalities to pass without so much as a hand slap whereas the film’s notable contemporaries in the genre, i.e. James Whale’s Frankenstein (filmed eleven years prior), not only confront similar issues, but casts them in a manner which, if the audience agrees with such notions, a sense of guilt is set upon the them as a consequence. I was admittedly enthralled at the timing of the monster’s implied presence coinciding with various characters’ guilt (thus possibly a figment of their imaginations and possible psychoses) yet this theme was eliminated when the objective camera panned over four dead sheep once the monster was eluded, thus validating its existence by an outside party (the use of a subjective camera would have maintained this premise if utilized). Also, I have issues with the plausibility that good ol’ boy Oliver could cheat on his wife or that baby-faced Irena, obviously established in her career in New York, has never been courted prior to her engagement to Oliver.
I often ponder how the film would lend itself if Lewton and Tournear were permitted to withhold literal presentation the animal (Irena in cat form) during the film (they were forced to do so at the studio’s insistence that the monster be seen). Obviously, such a work would have the viewer leave the film without a resolute answer as to whether the curse of the cat people is an actual threat or merely a Freudian dilemma rooted in the mind of the female lead. However, conjecture in relation to would-be productions isn’t the point of cinema. What we are given is what we are to contend with as such. With this, I find Cat People interesting in its psychological assessment of fear and how it articulately portrays terror in images but cannot advocate the manner in which fear is allocated in the form of black-or-white characters which permit the status quo to rest easy in their seats throughout the production. Is the ease which such characters transverse morality what is to be ultimately feared? If so, Tournear failed on this count while inadvertently addressing other, less salient, issues.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
