Cat People (1942) Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph. Directed by Jacques Tourneur. Produced by Val Lewton. Screenplay bey DeWitt Bodeen.
Let’s call this horror noir, shall we? Because it combines the look and feel of the best noir films with a supernatural edge and laces them together with true fear.
On the surface, the film doesn’t seem like much. A low budget movie thrown together by a studio on the ropes, with a cast of unknowns, and a premise that sounds a little ridiculous. A woman who turns into a panther when she’s aroused? Sounds less like a horror movie than . . . well, it sound like something, anyway.
Combine this with 40′s restrictions on the frank discussion of sexuality onscreen, with the fairly tame levels of shock that were deemed effective on audiences at the time, and you shouldn’t have a masterpiece on your hands.
But that is precisely what we have, and not just because Roger Ebert says so.
In the first place, the restrictions on the sex chatter work to the advantage of the film. It is, after all, a movie about repression, and fear of the sexual, and nothing reinforces those themes like the hint of eroticism being everywhere and nowhere at once. This is helped by Simone Simon’s portrayal of Irena, who looks both wholesome as a cloistered nun and as full of wanton lust as a rip-roaring nymphomaniac. This is not commonly pulled off, and her performance is the dark star whose gravity holds everything else in Cat People together. There are other good jobs as well: Jane Randolph as Alice hits just the right notes, bringing levelheaded earthiness in to play as the yin to Irena’s exotic (and erotic) yang, and Tom Conway as Dr. Judd injects just the right amount of doomed skepticism. He is the rational man of science standing before primal forces he only thinks he’s got a handle on. (Typical man, in other words.)
There isn’t much in the way of overt horror in this movie, due to the unexpectedly providential lack of a budget, but the steadily building atmospheric dread is remarkable, and the scene where the panther stalks Alice in the pool is a marvel of suspense. You know how it all has to play out, of course, and it does. But story is not all about plot, and we come to like and care for most of the characters in Cat People a great deal.
Like a couple of other movies on this demented movie crawl, Night of the Hunter and Les Diaboliques, Cat People achieves a distinct dreamlike quality that is lacking in more recent horror films. (It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen it, but I seem to recall it wholly absent from what I remember as a dismal remake.) I keep coming up against the idea that less is more, and this is most certainly an aesthetic that has been lost to the horror film, by and large. Cat People reminds us, I think, how powerful this ideal is, particularly when creating a sense of terror is the goal.
I don’t know how people weaned on splatter will view this movie. Certainly, growing up in the 1980′s, I watched more than my share of bloodletting, but I just can’t see a group of moviegoers who’ve suckled at the bloody teat of crap like Saw and Hostel and their deformed ilk, films in which subhuman brutality is exalted, I can’t see people who truly think gross is scary finding much to like in Cat People.
Their loss. For those who can appreciate the quiet subtlety of fear in the shadows, Cat People verges on perfection.
