Post by Deleted on Sept 15, 2012 18:49:00 GMT -5
"You can fool everybody, but laudie dearie me, you can't fool a cat. They seem to know who's not right."-- Woman at Pet Shop
"Even as fog continues to lie in the valleys, so does ancient sin cling to the low places, the depressions in the world consciousness."--
(The Anatomy of Atavism - Dr. Louis Judd)
IMDB Page: www.imdb.com/title/tt0034587/
Roger Ebert's "Great Movie" review: rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060312/REVIEWS08/603120301/1023
Other essays: www.filmsite.org/catp.html
filmislove.blogspot.com/2008/11/cat-people-tourneur-1942.html
With October fast approaching, I felt that now would be a fine time to do director Jacques Tourner and producer Val Lewton's low budget, impressionistic horror movie "Cat People" (1942). Cat People deals with the troubled relationship between Serbian artist Irena (Simone Simon) and American architect Oliver Reed.
Oliver meets the mysterious Irena at the zoo, preoccupied with sketching a fierce panther. Dark haired, somber, with a sparkly cat brooch on her suit, Irena strikes a lovely but strange figure and Oliver starts a conversation with her. Dissatisfied with her drawing, she crumples up and throws away three sketches; Oliver saves the third and opens it up, revealing a sketch of a snarling panther pierced by a heavy sword. Irena asks Oliver over for tea and, soon, the new couple grow closer and closer.
However, Irena has a secret: as the bizarre, antiquated decor of her house suggests. She explains that a particular statue depicts King John of Serbia - who in medieval times executed witches of his kingdom who often took the form of cats. Much to Oliver's disbelief, Irena claims to be a descendent of those very witches and that knowledge makes her an outsider among others. However, Oliver persists and eventually marries Irena; their marriage finds trouble when a coworker of Oliver's, Alice (Jane Randolph), starts to spend a little too much time with the couple and a psychologist that Irena visits, Dr, Judd (Tom Conway), who starts to fall with her. And there's the whole cat thing....
Cat People is noted for the film noir inspired photography of Lewis Musuraca in such scenes as Alice's frightened walk on the shadowy sidewalk and Irena's attack in the pool. Low light camera, lack of dialogue, unnerving performances, these two scenes created a blue print for psychological horror. Simone Simon's anxious, imperfect performance conveys the strangeness of her predicament and the sadness of her ultimate fate.
A low budget production, Cat People generated an enormous amount of money for RKO, leading Tourner to create a host of sequels. Tourner, the director behind the film noir classic "Out of the Past" and a host of horror movies like "I Walked with a Zombie", set the bar for unnerving, psychological horror. A remake was made in 1982 by Paul Schrader (famous for writing "Raging Bull" and "Taxi Driver") and starring Natassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell that, while a fine movie in its own right, lacked the original's creepy atmosphere. Some discussion questions:
1. Female power is one of the key sources of terror in the film. Compare Irena with Alice and note the contrast between the dark haired, European beauty and the American Alice. Note also how Alice's attachment to her co-worker Oliver is less innocent than at first glance.
2. Note how the scenes at the pool and on the sidewalk are constructed and how they effect the audience. The maxim "less is more" shows up over and over again when discussing horror; how is this expressed in these scenes?
3. What does the film say about Eastern Europe? Early in the film, Irena meets with a dark haired woman who teasingly calls her "sister". With the talk of ancient blood lines and cat people, what can we get from the film's portrayal of places like Serbia? The blood line talk also figures into "Dracula" both positively (Dracula talks about being from a long line of nobles, outlining their military triumphs) and negatively (Van Helsing talks about Dracula's ancestry in the negative and notes that the Count is mentally like a child in some respects),
4. Irena is an incredibly sympathetic figure. What does it mean to root for the monster, to feel sorry for it?
