Cat People

Finally making it to the top of my Netflix queue is the Val Lewton Horror Collection, a set of nine brooding horror films that the producer made for RKO films during the 1940s. His first is probably his most famous, Cat People.

In 1942 RKO was reeling from the financial losses that Citizen Kane was piling up, and turned to Lewton to make a series of B-horror pictures. With Jacques Tourneur directing, they hit upon an interesting style of horror--all of it suggested, rather than seen (there's a scene in The Bad and the Beautiful in which Kirk Douglas, playing a producer, does the same thing after seeing the ludicrous costumes his monsters are supposed to wear).

Cat People thus is a much more psychological horror film, although it seems laughably tame to today's moviegoers, who are used to seeing blood-splattered gore. A remake of the film, released in 1982, added carnage (I still vividly remember the scene in which Ed Begley Jr. gets his arm ripped off by a panther), but if it were remade today we'd get CGI effects of a woman turning into a cat.

The story of Cat People is simple. A young Serbian woman (Simone Simon), is drawn to the panther cage at the zoo. She meets a stolid young man, named Oliver Reed (a delicious coincidence), played by Kent Smith. They fall in love, but she will not kiss him. She tells him stories about her old village, where Satan worshipers fled into the hills and became "cat people." She fears that she is one of them, and any emotion, whether it's anger, jealousy, or even love, will bring out the beast in her.

Smith marries her anyway, and in an unintentionally funny scene Simon tells him that she wishes she could be Mrs. Reed in every way possible. We later see they have separate bedrooms, so poor Oliver must have quite the set of blue balls.

Of course this is all about the fear of female sexuality, a rather quaint notion even for 1942. It also contains a typical, for the time period, mistrust of psychiatry, as she goes to see a doctor (Tom Conway), who is a silver-tongued masher. The feline connection is also used to blunt effect when Smith becomes involved with a co-worker (Jane Randolph), and the two women are, in effect, having a "cat fight."

This leads to Cat People's most effective scene, and the one in which it's best remembered for (the scene was duplicated in the '82 film). Randolph is alone in a darkened swimming pool, and hears something like the growling of a large cat. Nothing is seen except dancing shadows on the walls and water, but the lighting is so well done that we don't need to see a cat--the effect is accomplished in our imaginations.

Cat People was a big money-maker, and though it seems dated it has its charms. I doubt it would scare anybody today, but the techniques used are still relevant and intriguing.