Cat People
Programme Notes

To tie in with Theatre by the Lake's staging of Kiss of the Spiderwoman (last performance 1 November 2003), Keswick Film Club is screening Cat People. Central to the dialogue in Kiss of the Spiderwoman is the recounting by a prisoner, Molina, of a film he cherishes. The name of the movie is not revealed in the play but film buffs may recognise it as the 1943 low-budget horror picture, Cat People. Here is the story of a film that not only transported Molina beyond his cell walls but also transformed a Hollywood movie genre.

In 1942, Val Lewton joined the Hollywood studio, RKO, as a producer. His remit was to make horror films and soon he began assembling a team that included French émigré director, Jacques Tourneur and writer, De Witt Bodeen. The head of the studio, Charles Koerner, is reputed to have been at a party where someone suggested to him, "Why don't you make a picture called Cat People?" Koerner then told Lewton to go away and make the film. Understandably, Lewton glumly told his writer that he'd not hold it against him if he wanted to pull out of a project with such a stupid title. Bodeen stayed, however, and Lewton determined to make something intelligent and in good taste. In other words, not the cheap horror movie the studio was expecting.

Werewolf films were doing big business at the time and RKO probably wanted their own Cat Woman to compete with the Wolf Man pictures so successfully produced by other studios. Bodeen's first script was a period piece but Lewton insisted that middle European settings and men with big capes would make audiences laugh. So a contemporary New York setting was used with a Serbian protagonist, Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), haunted by ancestral memories of her town's werecat history. It may be that the plot was not entirely original but Lewton was obviously intent on being original in the way he worked with it.

Lewton thought it would be disastrous attempting to cast a leading lady with any sort of cat-like quality, preferring the cute and cuddly face of Simone Simon, a kitten-faced girl who was seemingly not at all threatening. The male protagonist has the unfortunate name (for modern audiences, at least) of Oliver Reed. He is an insipid character played by Kent Smith, an equally atypical Hollywood leading man with no great sex appeal. It is the captivating Simone Simon, though, who steals the audience's attention.

These two characters meet at the opening to the film when Reed spots Irena, a fashion artist, sketching a black panther in the Central Park Zoo. Successfully wooing the mysterious Irena, Reed marries her in double quick time - Hollywood narratives ran at breakneck speed at this time - and now begin their troubles. It seems Irena is terrified that she is one of the chosen, a woman who will turn into a cat when aroused, emotionally or sexually. For this reason, the couple spend their wedding night in separate beds, Reed declaring he will be patient. This is quite daring for a movie of this time: marital frigidity was not a subject Hollywood normally dared touch in the 1940s.

Psychoanalysis was not taboo, however - possibly because Hollywood filmmakers were going to psychiatrists in droves during the 1940s - and so the familiar figure of the psychiatrist is introduced when Reed persuades Irena to seek help. Under hypnosis, she tells of the cat women of her village who in jealousy, anger or passion, turn into panthers. How, if they were to be kissed by a lover, they would be driven by their own evil to kill him. But the film is not an exploration of neurosis. It is a film about a woman who turns into a panther. Lewton used the psychiatrist as a device to give the yarn some credibility.

It is this kind of subtlety that made Cat People special. Instead of gnashing teeth and dodgy masks, ingredients that ultimately made audiences laugh, Lewton employed horror by suggestion, infiltrating the lives of ordinary people. This is a modus operandi that modern filmmakers seem to have forsaken, with their over-reliance on special effects and in-your-face gore.

At this point, Reed's colleague, Alice, becomes entangled in the story. Rather than Irena's struggle to keep her cat person heritage at bay, it is her jealousy of Alice that becomes her dominant motive; indeed she now seems to be submitting to her animal instincts. There follows a brief but groundbreaking stalking scene as Irena follows Alice through Central Park at night. When Alice hears someone (something?) behind her, she hurries through the park, but her terror is magnified when, knowing her stalker is still behind her, she can no longer hear the footsteps. In a panic, she runs for her life. With a cat-like hiss of breaks, a bus crosses her path in a moment designed to make audiences jump. This editing device became known as the 'bus' and is a shock trick used consistently throughout the succeeding horror movie repertoire.

For modern audiences, the papier-mâché set might detract from the tension of the scene (it was shot on a soundstage in Hollywood, rather than on location on the other side of the country in New York). Nevertheless, contemporary audiences -- however naïve by today's standards -- will have witnessed a new, revolutionary way of making horror movies: out went the monsters and mad scientists in deepest Europe, to be replaced by the occult and the strange impinging on the lives of ordinary people in urban American settings. If audiences were becoming cynical towards gothic stories, Lewton knew that placing the story in the same world as that of the audience and by having extraordinary things happen to ordinary people, filmgoers would be given a fright. By employing film noir light and shade to provide mood, all kinds of imagined horrors could be planted in audiences' minds.

Cat People is not a film without flaws: there are some shaky performances; dialogue is decidedly dodgy in parts and, as mentioned above, to modern audiences the sets can look a bit creaky. But the British Film Institute has declared it one of the key works in cinema history. It certainly made an impression on Molina in Kiss of the Spiderwoman, his recounting of the Cat People plot transporting him and his cellmate to a more bearable world outside of their immediate, horrific reality. Val Lewton's trick was to place the strange and terrifying inside the normal world of cinema audiences' heads.

Ian Picken
October 2003

© Keswick Film Club 2003
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