Last night, I watched my Criterion Blu-ray of
Cat People (1942).
A good-natured everyman engineer, Oliver, played by Kent Smith, encounters the gorgeous and enigmatic Irena, played by the unforgettable Simone Simon, while visiting the panther exhibits at the Central Park Zoo in New York. Oliver quickly falls for Irena, despite her somewhat withdrawn oddness and her stories about the folklore of her home village in Serbia, where people under the thrall of witchcraft and Satanism were driven out by King John. The couple are married, but their marriage is never consummated, because of Irena's belief that she will turn into a deadly cat if she is intimate with another person. As relationship problems subsequently develop and Irena becomes jealous of her husband's preoccupation with a co-worker, Alice, played by the beautiful Jane Randolph, a series of unsettling and horrific events ensue.
Cat People was filmed over 18 days for a budget of less than $150,000, but it reportedly earned four million in theaters, and, like the subsequent profitable low-budget scary movies,
Halloween and
The Blair Witch Project, it inspired a wave of copycat (pun intended) flicks that took a cue from its elegant minimalism. This film, however, defies imitation and benefits immensely from the collaboration of director Jacques Tourneur and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, both of whom also worked together to create my personal all-time favorite movie, the 1947 film noir,
Out of the Past. Most notably,
Cat People was produced by the legendary Val Lewton, who created a subsequent streak of innovative old-school-eerie horror films, namely
I Walked with a Zombie,
The Leopard Man, and
The Seventh Victim, that thrived on the use of shadows and brilliant lighting techniques.
These days,
Cat People is acknowledged as the most important horror film that emerged between the heyday of the Universal Monsters films of the 1930s and the Hammer Studios horror of the late 1950s. It also works exceedingly well as an early prototype of the film noir genre, due to its "This will not end well." aura and its dark visual styles.
Is this original 1942 version of
Cat People a scary movie by today's standards?
I think that it's still an eerie film, mainly because it goes a long way with the power of suggestion. An odd encounter at a restaurant early in the film, when a sleek catlike woman approaches Irena and briefly greets her while she and Oliver are celebrating their wedding with friends, is never acknowledged again, but the ambiguity of the moment resonates through the rest of the story. This scene could be interpreted at face value, as two "cat people" encountering each other, or it could even be interpreted as a vague reference to a history of lesbianism in Irena's past. Irena's preoccupation with dark thoughts and the inability of her husband, Oliver, to bring her out of her thoughts certainly draws parallels to how clinical depression not only affects those suffering with it, but their spouses and loved ones as well. Like the classic-era films noir that were released a few years later, this movie uses subtlety with regard to plot points about sex to dodge the confines of the Production Code. The result is an effective blend of horror and eroticism.
There are a couple of honest-to-goodness awesome horror movie moments in
Cat People. The first involves a dark alley where Alice is being followed by someone or
something, while the second involves Alice being terrorized while swimming in a shadowy indoor pool. Both scenes make incredible use of sound effects.
This Criterion Blu-ray sports an excellent 2K scan of a 35mm source, and it is a notable upgrade over the already-impressive presentation of my old Warner Bros. DVD. The video quality really brings out the best of the shadows and black levels. The audio quality is a spot-on match, and the sound effects that are integral to this movie's old-school chills are given a wonderful new life.
A commentary track by historian Gregory Mank is ported over from the DVD, but it's a highly informative and entertaining listen for new and old fans alike. I also enjoyed an interview with John Bailey, the cinematographer of the impressive 1982 remake of this film. A French interview with Jacques Tourneur has some great moments, especially for those of us who love his entire catalogue. Finally, a 2008 Val Lewton documentary,
Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, is a fascinating piece that serves both as a celebration of his brilliance for longtime fans like me or as a thorough introduction for the uninitiated.
This is one of the year's best Blu-rays.
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