Cat People is a horror film produced by Val Lewton and directed by Jacques Tourneur. The writing is credited to DeWitt Bodeen, but Tourneur, composer Roy Webb, Lewton and his secretary all contributed to the script. The cinematographer was Tourneur's sometime collaborator Nicholas Musuraca. The film stars Simone Simon, Kent Smith and Tom Conway.

Cat People was followed by a sequel, The Curse of the Cat People, in . A remake directed by Paul Schrader and starring Nastassja Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, and John Heard was released in .

In 1993, Cat People was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Plot

At a city zoo, Serbian-born fashion designer, Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), stands before the cage of the black panther, apparently trying to make a sketch of it. She catches the attention of an American naval construction designer, Oliver Reed (Kent Smith), when she balls up a draft of the sketch and tries to throw it in a trash bin, without success. The two then become engaged in a conversation, with Irena eventually agreeing to taking him to her apartment for lunch. As they walk away, once of Irena's botched drafts blows in the wind, and is revealed to show a panther impaled by a sword.

At Irena's apartment, Oliver admires a statue in her possession of a crowned medieval figure on horseback impaling a cat with his sword. Irena tells Oliver that the figure is the (fictional) King John of Serbia. She proceeds to tell Oliver the legend behind the statue, telling him about how a Satanic tribe invaded her childhood village during King John's reign. Under the tribe's control, the people of the village were transformed into debaucherous devil-worshippers. When King John drove the evil tribe out of the village and saw what the villagers had become, he ordered them all killed. However, "the wisest and the most wicked" of them escaped.

As the plot unfolds it becomes clear that Irena believes herself to be descended from the evil tribe, and that she fears that she will be transformed into a panther if aroused to passion, anger, or jealousy.

Critical overview

Although Cat People is usually categorized as a horror movie, it can also be considered a film noir, as Irena assumes many of the traits of both femme fatale and the typical noir hero alienated from conventional society, psychologically wounded and morally ambiguous.

Cast

• Simone Simon as Irena Dubrovna Reed
• Kent Smith as Oliver Reed
• Tom Conway as Dr. Louis Judd
• Jane Randolph as Alice Moore
• Jack Holt as The Commodore
• Elizabeth Russell as The Cat Woman (uncredited)
• Alan Napier as Doc Carver (uncredited)
• Theresa Harris as Minnie, waitress at Sally Lunds café (uncredited)
• Elizabeth Dunn as Miss Plunkett, pet shop owner (uncredited)
• Mary Halsey as Blondie, apartment house desk clerk (uncredited)

Cast notes

• Elizabeth Russell, the sister-in-law of Rosalind Russell, was a regular in films produced by Val Lewton, appearing in Cat People its sequel The Curse of the Cat People The Seventh Victim and Youth Runs Wild . She would also appear later in Lewton's Bedlam ().

Production details

The film was shot from 28 July to 21 August at RKO's "Gower Gulch" studios in Hollywood, with a budget of under $140,000. Sets left over from previous, higher-budgeted RKO productions—notably the staircase from The Magnificent Ambersons—were utilized.

Lewton and his production team claim credit for inventing the popular horror film technique called the "bus". The term came from the scene where Irena is walking behind Alice; the audience expects Irena to turn into a panther at any moment and attack her. At the most tense point, when the camera focuses on Alice's confused and terrified face, the silence is shattered by what sounds like a hissing panther—but it is a bus pulling over to pick her up. After the excitement dies down, the audience is left uncertain whether anything supernatural or life-threatening actually happened. This technique has been adapted into a great many horror movies since then. Anytime a movie creates a scene where the tension rises and dissipates into nothing at all, merely an empty boo!, it is a "bus".

Near the end of the filming of Cat People, two crews were working to finish the picture on time, one at night, filming the animals, and one during the day with the cast.

Reception

Reviews of the film were mixed when the film was first released. Variety magazine called Cat People a "weird drama of thrill-chill caliber while Bosley Crowther writing for the New York Times commented that "The Cat People is a labored and obvious attempt to induce shock.

A Turner Movie Channel documentary on the work of Val Lewton premiered in 2007. It suggested that the financial success of Cat People in its original release was instrumental in saving RKO from financial ruin. A sequence in the 1952 film The Bad and The Beautiful where Kirk Douglas' character makes a name for himself as a producer with a low budget film called Duel of The Cat Men is plainly an allusion to Lewton's success with Cat People. The key to the success of the fictional Duel of The Cat Men is said to be Douglas' decision not to show the monsters around which the film's plot revolves but to rely instead on darkness on screen and the imaginations of film goers to create fear when it becomes apparent that the costumes the studio has at hands will not be frightening.

Now able to move onto bigger things, Douglas rejects an offer to produce a sequel to be called The Return of The Cat Man. Lewton accepted the assignment of producing a follow-up film called Curse of The Cat People, but the movie, which retained Kent Smith and Jane Randolph's characters, and which showed Simone Simon (either as a ghost or else as the wholly imaginary friend of a child) was not truly a horror movie.

As was the case generally with Lewton's B-movies for RKO, issues of good and evil are treated with more ambiguity and complexity than was typical in Hollywood films of the time. Tom Conway's character, Dr. Judd, is nominally the film's "bad guy" as he permits himself to fall in love with his married patient and attempts to enter into a relationship with her, but he is not otherwise a villainous figure. Conway reappears as Dr. Judd in a later Lewton film, The Seventh Victim. It is unclear if this means that he survived events at the conclusion of Cat People, or if the events in The Seventh Victim are meant to have occurred first. In The Seventh Victim he makes a passing reference to a former patient who went mad from an obsession, and this may be a reference to Simone Simon's character. In any event, Dr. Judd is definitely cast as a "good guy" in the later film, although it can be argued he is again somewhat overconfident and naive in assessing what he is dealing with.

Today, Cat People still has a cult following TV Guide's review of the film praised the film's cast:

Superbly acted (with Simon evoking both pity and chills), Cat People testifies to the power of suggestion and the priority of imagination over budget in the creation of great cinema. The film was Lewton's biggest hit, its viewers lured in by such bombastic advertising as "Kiss me and I'll claw you to death!" – a line more lurid than anything that ever appeared onscreen.

Prolific film critic Roger Ebert has included Cat People in his list of great movies. As of February 6, 2008, the film holds a 94% Fresh rating on popular ratings website Rotten Tomatoes.

This film was referenced in the novel Kiss of the Spider Woman by Argentine novelist Manuel Puig, in which two inmates pass the time by discussing the films one of them has seen. Though this movie is not mentioned by name, and some of the details are not recalled accurately, the parallels to the plot, the mention of Jane Randolph as one of the stars, and the protagonist's name being Irena clearly indicate that Puig was speaking about this film.

Notes

Documentary

• Val Lewton Horror Collection DVD documentary 2005

External links