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Cat People (1942), directed by Jacques Tourneur.
Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph, Tom Conway.
Synopsis: Irena Dubrovna is a Serbian fashion illustrator in New York. She is fascinated by the panthers at the zoo. One day, while sketching the panthers, she meets Oliver Reed, with whom she falls in love. After a whirlwind romance, Oliver and Irena are married. On their honeymoon, Irena reveals a dark secret. She tells Oliver of a wicked tribe of people from her homeland who are cursed to become panthers when their passions are aroused. She claims to be descended from this tribe and to carry their curse. Oliver, understanding husband that he is, does not get to consummate their marriage on their wedding night, or on any night thereafter. Oliver sends Irena to a psychiatrist, believing her fears to be some kind of hysteria. Meanwhile, he cozies up to Alice, a woman he works with. Irena gets wind of this, and begins to stalk Alice. Something...else...stalks Alice, too. Meanwhile, her psychiatrist has become smitten with Irena, and when he makes his move, Irena’s inner self gets out.... Cat People represents a radical break in the way horror movies function. It introduces a number of innovations to the genre that, over time, have spread throughout the genre and beyond. Freud defined the id as a place where "Eros struggles in darkness with Thanatos," as a place where sex and death contend. This is one of the primary thematic occupations of the horror genre at large. Prior to Cat People, the psychological underpinnings of the horror movie were almost entirely sub-rosa. The psychosexual subtexts of Frankenstein or Dracula, for instance, need to be decoded; they dwell almost entirely in symbolic language. Cat People puts the impulses behind its story in the foreground. Not only is Irena’s sexual dysfunction on the surface, but the hints of its causes are discussed openly through the convenient agency of Tom Conway’s urbane psychiatrist. The psychosexual underpinnings of the film noir thriller find one of their earliest expressions in Cat People, a film that exerts more than a little influence on that genre, as well as its own. Hitchcock would be the filmmaker most profoundly influenced by this: prior to Cat People, and prior to the Lewton films in general, the sexual nature of his films is mostly sub-rosa. His signature thrillers were still very much in the mode of Fritz Lang’s thrillers. After the Lewton films, Hitchcock’s films become almost neurotically sexualized. Hitch would later pay tribute to Cat People by including a shot-for-shot swipe of the pet store sequence in The Birds. The visual strategies of Cat People were revolutionary, too. While it is commonly held that the deep shadows utilized by Tourneur and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca were dictated by the cheapness of their sets, rarely has an accommodation of the economic necessities of filmmaking yielded such a rich visual environment. The shadowy backdrop of the film mirrors the thematic darkness of the action--a technique much copied by the makers of films noir later in the decade. The pattern of light and dark throughout the movie mirrors the cage in which the panthers live in the zoo. This is a motif that is most strikingly realized in the scene near the end when the panther stalks Dr. Judd. Tourneur has filmed the panther from behind a grouping of furniture, filmed in silhouette, and the tracking of the camera as it follows the panther creates a strobing effect. Cat People also gains from its modern (in 1942) urban setting. At the time, most horror films were set in some unspecified middle-Europe or some other exotic place that doesn’t much resemble anyplace real, but Cat People exploits its modern here-and-now to the fullest. There is an immediacy to Cat People that eludes, say, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, which came out the following year. But the real strength of Cat People lies in its orchestration of suspense set-pieces. Lewton built his films around set-pieces and constructed the remainder of the films to accommodate them. Cat People contains some doozies. The stalking of Jane Randolph’s Alice through Central Park is surely the most famous of these, though the scene at the swimming pool comes in a close second. The park scene is one of the most imitated shock scenes in movies, in which we are privy to the point of view of the monster from time to time, and which is concluded with a sharp noise that sounds like the shriek of a panther. That the sound is the abrupt squeal of the brakes of a bus provides a catharsis of sorts. This sort of thing is a cliche now, but it was fresh when Cat People first deployed it. The stalking at the swimming pool, on the other hand, remains fresh. Everything is right in this sequence. The weird patterns of light filtered through the water, the dull echo of the tile walls, the lapping of the water, and the ominous shadows on the walls. Tourneur has filmed this sequence without music, which dramatically heightens the sense of place and the sense of being alone. The effect of the way this is filmed is to strand the viewer in the dark, with some dreadful thing circling just out of the range of his senses. Cat People doesn’t feel the need to show the viewer everything. Lewton and his collaborators quite rightly realize that anything they could show to the viewer (especially on the budget they had) couldn’t possibly measure up to what the viewer can imagine for himself. Cat People exploits this principle mercilessly. The closest thing to Lewton’s technique in the culture at the time were radio programs like Inner Sanctum and Lights Out, though I would suggest that the visual poetry of the Lewton films trumps theses programs. To an extent, all great horror movies function as archetypes and fairy tales, and despite the modernity of Cat People’s look and setting, at its most basic, it’s a distaff reworking of "Little Red Riding Hood," in which Little Red Riding Hood is herself the Big Bad Wolf. If Cat People were only famous for its set-pieces, it would still be a great movie, but the addition of small touches--like the scene in the diner where a woman accosts Irena with a greeting of "moya sestra,"("my sister")--push the movie into the realm of the magical, and give Lewton’s wholly invented tale of the cat people the weight of genuine myth. And that’s a powerful thing... |