Cat People (1942)
Sunday, 4:00 pm, Regal Downtown #4
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Writer: DeWitt Bodeen
Cinematographer: Nicholas Musuraca
Cast: Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Tom Conway
Running Time: 73 min
Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), a beautiful and mysterious Serbian immigrant living in New York City, believes that she suffers from an ancient curse: when emotionally aroused, she will transform into a beast and kill her mate. With this low-budget film, using leftover sets from Orson Welles’s Magnificent Ambersons, producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur (both European immigrants to Hollywood) breathed new life into the genre of psychological horror and scored an unexpected box office triumph for RKO Pictures. The compact narrative encompasses feminism, forbidden desire, sexual frigidity, and urban alienation, while the moody night photography and femme fatale protagonist anticipate the dark, neurotic world of film noir.
Cat People would make an overnight star of Simone Simon, and turn the mild-mannered Lewton into the unlikeliest of Hollywood moguls. Inspiring dozens of homages, including an extended tribute from Kirk Douglas in The Bad and the Beautiful and an underrated 1982 remake from writer-director Paul Schrader, the original Cat People proves that, as Kirk Douglas said, “The dark has a life of its own.” Roger Ebert, who has included the film among his Great Movies, just might have paid it the ultimate compliment when he wrote, “Cat People is constructed entirely out of fear. There wasn’t a budget for much of anything else.”
