#261: Cat People
Not for people who actually like cats…
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 3, 2020.
Initial release: December 5, 1942
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Noir and horror, while related genres with a lot of stylistic and thematic overlap, are still considered separate genres unto themselves. But the link between them is rarely so strong as in the 1942 cult classic Cat People.
Irena Dubrovna is a Serbian immigrant and artist who works in New York City’s fashion industry. One day while admiring the panther at Central Park Zoo, she meets Oliver Reed, an engineer working for a shipbuilding firm. Their relationship starts off harmlessly enough, but Irena is possessed of the idea that she is descended from an ancient group of witches, cursed to transform into a vicious panther and kill any man who she dares to kiss. Oliver thinks it’s all hooey, but humors her even after they marry in an appallingly short amount of time. It soon becomes clear that her fixation on a childhood fairytale is far more serious than previously thought, reinforced by the fact that animals seem to react negatively to her (she even frightens her pet bird to death simply by trying to get it to sit on her finger.)
Oliver, through all this, remains as skeptical and blandly reassuring as ever. All he wants is for Irena to be happy, even sending her to a psychiatrist, Dr. Judd, but at the same time he confides to his workplace friend Alice that he and Irena are basically strangers. The marriage and Irena’s sanity both soon begin to deteriorate; she begins to stalk Alice, in one scene following her through a darkened Central Park, Alice growing increasingly frightened as she realizes someone is after her, the tension building — then cut to the hiss of a bus for a good cat scare.
Most film noirs of the era are shot rather simply, often just using whatever sets the production can get its hands on. Cat People stands out for the way it lingers just long enough, and is lit just starkly enough, and is just daring enough to play up the eroticism a little bit. So we’re treated to brilliantly shot scenes like Alice trapped in a swimming pool, or a brief scene, shot three-quarters from behind, of a nude Irena as she sobs quietly to herself in the tub. I can’t think of many film noirs from the era that are this openly sexual. What really makes this movie for me is its intense commitment to ambiguity. It’s never quite clear whether or not what we’re seeing is real; was Irena right, or is she deeply mentally ill? Dr. Judd is hilariously, ineffectively Freudian (and deeply unprofessional.) Even towards the end when the film seems to confirm the supernatural element, it’s still not really a done deal. The editing is sharp and smart; that and excellent use of shadow makes sure that we can’t trust our eyes one bit.
This makes the real point of the film that of a disintegrating marriage, and of Oliver’s willfully naive cheerfulness and dismissal of Irena’s concerns being pitted against something that he can’t even begin to comprehend — he even admits to never being unhappy.
It’s interesting to see how the actors play off each other. Irena (Simone Simon) is tragically earnest to the point of melodrama; Kent Smith’s Oliver Reed is seemingly deliberately wooden and one-note, like a golden retriever that learned how to act. Tom Conway’s Dr. Judd is charming, slick, even seductive; a thin veneer of professionalism doesn’t hide the fact that he’s frankly a fucking terrible psychiatrist. And Alice (Jane Randolph) is tough as nails, refusing to be yet another cute Hollywood ingenue. It’s a heady mix that makes for some seriously great dynamics; you might find something to criticize in the acting, but in some ways it’s like Darkthrone’s early album Transilvanian Hunger: it just wouldn’t sound right if it had been produced competently.
This film is a dark dream, a beautifully shot hallucination that, over 80 years later, still manages to be scary, even disturbing. It’s ambiguous, avoiding the typical Hollywood good-and-evil tropes. For a wartime America, this film must have seemed like a compelling nightmare. Just… don’t get too attached to the panther.
