Cat People (1942)

RKO Pictures was a studio that often went from success to failure.  It was one of the biggest, releasing movies such as King Kong, Citizen Kane and Notorious.  It weathered a number of ups and downs, mismanagement under Howard Hughes and a final demise in 1957 when the company was sold to Universal.  Along the way, and often because the studio was desperate to make money, a number of interesting movies were made.

Cat People was the first produced by Val Lewton.  Directed by Jacques Tourneur, the movie was produced in the way of many b-movies where the title came first and the writer, in this case DeWitt Bodeen, was tasked with coming up with an actual story once the picture was given the green light.  Lewton was new so he suffered studio interference while being given a small budget, but he and Tourneur managed to overcome all that and create one of the most popular classic horror films.

Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) is a Serbian immigrant living alone in a Brownstone in New York.  One day while doing sketches of a panther in Central Park she catches the eye of Oliver Reed (Kent Smith).  What begins as friendship turns into attraction, but Irena is reluctant to return any physical love.  She comes from a village where the legend has it the women would turn into large cats when they become angry or jealous and, if embraced and kissed by a man, would kill their lover.

The lack of intimacy creates a wedge between Oliver and Irena, with her insistence on the stories from the old country leading him to have her visit Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), a psychiatrist among his group of friends.  Things are also exacerbated as Reed's coworker Alice (Jane Randolph) openly declares her love for him.  As Irena becomes jealous of Alice and suffers unwanted advances from Dr. Judd it becomes apparent that maybe some old legends have a bit of truth to them.

Because of the small budget Jacques Tourneur often used shadows and reflections to create mood rather than outright showing Irena in cat form.  There are no transformation scenes, only hints, and by nature this also leaves the viewer guessing if it is all legend or if the tales are true.  There is also creative use of sound, in particular when Irena follows Alice on a deserted New York sidewalk and when it appears that Alice is being watched by an animal while she goes for a swim.

Because of the Hays Code in the 1940s it was usually not just the style but a requirement that people who did the wrong things in a movie met an appropriate fate at the end.  The problem with Cat People is that the only actual good person is the supposed monster, while everyone else, at least by today's standards, is either acting in a narcissistic manner or just plain violating consent.  It works well because, at least at the time, it didn't have audiences knowing right off who was going to survive to the end. 

Simone Simon is famous, at least in the United States, for this particular film.  There are no prosthetics and nothing particular done to turn her into a cat person, but instead everything is in wardrobe and performance.  Tom Conway is suitably arrogant and creepy, and the role of Dr. Louis Judd was reprised in a later Lewton production, The Seventh Victim.  However, it is the atmosphere that Tourneur created that makes his movie what it is and kept audiences coming back well into the next year to see this film.  

Cat People (1942)

Time: 73 minutes

Starring: Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph, Tom Conway

Director: Jacques Tourneur