Cat People (1942)
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Honors:
This low budget horror picture left an indelible mark in the
genre of horror film and aided in financially saving one of Hollywood’s major
motion picture studios. Led by a first time producer, starring a no name cast,
with a feature where the audience never gets to see the “monster,” Cat People would quietly revolutionize
the entire genre with its story of fear and remains a hidden gem in motion
picture history.
Cat People is a
horror drama of a young woman who believes she she has the ability to turn into
a large cat and murder. When Oliver (Kent Smith) married a beautiful young
Serbian woman, Irena (Simone Simon), complications arise as she refuses to be
passionate with him in fear that if she is aroused she will turn into a beast
and murder her husband based on an old curse from her home village. Despite the
aid of Dr. Judd (Tom Conway), a trusted psychiatrist, Irena refuses to become
intimate with her husband as jealousy arises over Oliver becoming romantic with
a fellow co-worker, Alice (Jane Randolph). Oliver falls out of love with her
distant wife and wishes for a divorce causing Irena’s beastly side to begin to stalk
and endanger Alice. Together Oliver and Alice fend off Irena’s transformative large
cat form, but when Dr. Judd shares his deep passion for Irena she transforms
and kills the psychiatrist. To stop herself from further infliction of her
brutality Irena visits the zoo and has and releases a panther which kills her,
relieving the world of her curse.
On the surface to the contemporary viewer this picture may
not appear to anything particularly special, but its product is the case of
timing and creative solutions of motion picture production. In its wake it
leaves a legacy that would inspire entirely new way to build suspense and
frighten audiences unseen by the monster movies made so popular by Universal
Pictures over the prior two decades. Few may understand its impact, but Cat People’s
influence on motion pictures remains decades later.
It was a feature that was produced on a very light budget,
one more associated for a B-movie, especially when considering it was made by
RKO Radio Pictures, one of Hollywood’s major motion picture studios. With the
industry feeling the finical effects of the war RKO was looking to produce
motion pictures on the cheap and would assign a former publicist, journalist,
and story editor Val Lewton with one such project. Lewton, a first-time
producer, was given only a $150,000 budget and a title Cat People upon which to produce a feature. Its result was a film
that was a surprising success.
Most of the sets would be recycled pieces from previous RKO
pictures, most notably the staircase from the financial Orson Welles bust The Magnificent Ambersons. Lewton
utilizes the services of little the used director recently dropped by MGM
Jacques Tourneur with whom he will have make many of these cheap B-movie horror
films in the coming years.
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| Smith and Randolph use a T-square as a cross to hold back an unholy beast. |
The film was cast with practical unknowns to greater
American audiences. Names like Kent Smith, Tom Conway and Jane Randolph actors
that would never make real names for themselves. The most marketable star was
French actress Simone Simon whose rocky career in Hollywood, best known for
being incredibly difficult to work with. Simon at least received a major push
by 20th Century-Fox before that studio dropped her and RKO picked
her up. She delivers the most memorable performance with her provocative look
and alluring European accent drawing in audiences to her mysterious character
of Irena.
With the low investment by the studio, what this motion
picture lacks in production value it makes up in suspense. With a story based
around the idea that the main antagonist transforms into a great cat and can
slay anyone from her husband, a romantic rival, or the doctor that is secretly
in love with her the suspense would lie on the idea of Irena’s transformative
state. However, despite utilizing live animal in cages for set pieces, using a
live roaming animal as a character would be too problematic and costly.
Therefore when Irena is assumed to be a great cat she mostly goes unseen,
leaving only faint hints of shadows and noises as the only sensory aspects of
Irena to both the characters on screen and to us the audience. Much like Steven
Spielberg’s Jaws decades later this
lack of seeing the “monster” actually creates more of a sense of insecurity as
our imaginations fill in what our eyes cannot see, which can provide a far more
powerful reaction.
The most inexpensive, yet most effective “trick,” used in
the feature is a moment where near nothing happens. Within this scene Alice is
being stalked by Irena and Alice builds up haste as she believes she is being
fallowed. The film leads us to consider at any point Alice will transform and
attack her prey. As the editing becomes quicker and quicker, the camera becomes
fixed on a shot of Alice with absolutely no sound when the silence is shattered
by a sharp noise only to reveal it was the approach of a bus opening its door,
with which Alice boards. In this scene suspense grows, tensions are high, and
expectations are built all for a moment the audiences thinks is coming and is
simply waiting for the big dramatic moment, when a loud noise breaks the silence
and creates a moment would make most viewers jump out of their seats.
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| Randolph inn the famous Lewton bus scene. |
Moments like these are none too uncommon several years
separated from Cat People, but back in
1942 this was a new device of scaring the audience. It was so new in fact that this
type of build and execution would be named after this very scene. A “Lewton
bus” became a phrase for a suspenseful moment with a quick and surprising
“boo!” intended to frighten audiences. To contemporary movie watchers, these
moments are all too common, but for audiences accustomed to Frankenstein or Dracula fear was built up to with monsters, not sudden moments.
Critics at the time were mixed with their reviews, but box
office returns manifest a surprising amount of viewership as the picture
brought in over $4,000,000, massive returns on investment for the producer and
studio. To many contemporary film critics and historians this creative manner
of shooting suspense on a limited budget and its creative film construction
would lead to Cat People to be one of
the most renowned horror films of cinema history, but is commonly buried behind
the likes of the various Universal monster movies of the age.
Cat People was
such a success for Lewton none of his fallow-up features would come close to
the same box office numbers he received in this, his first feature film. Even
the picture’s sequel The Curse of the Cat
People produced with the returning cast of Simon, Smith, and Randolph
drummed up little box office return and critics deeming it a failure for those
looking to receive similar stirs that established in Cat People.
In a sense the film was a groundbreaking horror feature,
although it is still not a pleasing film to all viewers. Perhaps it was just
luck that made these moments possible for the Lewton, Tourneur, or the editors
to make the decisions they did as budget was so very low. In any case the
product still remains what it is and it has inspired generations of filmmakers
with it creativity on lack of resources. Surprisingly Cat People remains highly praised by horror picture lovers that are
well versed on the genre’s history, making the feature quite a film to discover
along the way of motion picture study.
So give it a look. Cat
People may be far form the best horror film of all time, but it one of the
more revolutionary horror features in the history of the genre.
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