Cat People (1942) - film review

During a visit to the zoo, Oliver Reed meets Irena Dubrovna, an East European immigrant who works as a fashion designer in New York.  Oliver is drawn to the mysterious woman and a short while later the couple are married.   However, the marriage remains unconsummated. Irena is traumatised by an ancient Serbian legend in which women are transformed into wild cats when aroused by jealousy.   At Oliver’s insistence, Irena agrees to see an eminent psychologist, Dr Judd.  Meanwhile, Oliver has fallen in love with another woman, Alice Moore.  When she learns about Irena’s condition, Alice begins to sense that her life is in peril...

The film which magnificently resuscitated and re-defined the horror genre in Hollywood in the 1940s, Cat People remains a chilling work, its impact heightened by its understated performances and modest resources.  It was the first in a series of successful collaborations between producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur, who would go on to make some of the great horror classics of American cinema, most notably I Walked With a Zombie (1943).

Tourneur’s technique – which relies heavily on darkness and shadows to create menace and atmosphere – was inherited from his father, the great French director Maurice Tourneur.  The noirish cinematography works perfectly for this kind of psychological horror film which, in stark contrast to the horror films of the 1930s, avoids showing explicitly horrific images to scare its audience.  The device of showing just enough to arouse the spectator’s imagination but no more has since been used to great effect by many filmmakers but at the time it was quite revolutionary.  Like many advance in cinematic technique, this particular innovation was forced on the filmmaker by a very tight budget.  Also, the threat of censorship if anything too extreme were to be shown may probably have influenced Tourneur’s artistic decisions.

The film stars French actress Simone Simon (previously best known for her part in Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine ) and Kent Smith.  Simon is particularly striking as the feline femme fatale, her strong European accent adding to her creepy charms and sense of unreality.  She appears far more sympathetic than Kent Smith, a stock American good guy who, on realising he has married a dangerous nutcase falls at the drop of a hat for another woman.  The somewhat staid dialogue emphasises the caricatures and makes this an oddly subversive film.  On the one hand it shows the dangerous side of female sexuality, on the other it mocks typical American middle class values and, in particular, their preoccupation with convention and normality.

What most makes this such a great and memorable film are its magnificent set pieces - a bizarre dream sequence, the terrifying scene in the swimming pool, and the dramatic climax in which Irena finally reveals her true nature to her overly friendly psychiatrist.  More than sixty years on, and with so many developments in film technology since, these scenes still manage to send an icy-cold shiver down the spine.

The film’s popularity resulted in an equally successful but slightly less artistically accomplished sequel, The Curse of the Cat People (1944), directed by Robert Wise.

© James Travers 2004

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