Cat People 9781844576432, 9781838712556, 9781838714925

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BFI Film Classics

The BFI Film Classics is a series of books that introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author’s personal response to the film. For a full list of titles available in the series, please visit our website: www.palgrave.com/bfi ‘Magnificently concentrated examples of flowing freeform critical poetry.’ Uncut ‘A formidable body of work collectively generating some fascinating insights into the evolution of cinema.’ Times Higher Education Supplement ‘The series is a landmark in film criticism.’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video ‘Possibly the most bountiful book series in the history of film criticism.’ Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film Comment

Editorial Advisory Board Geoff Andrew, British Film Institute Edward Buscombe William Germano, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art Lalitha Gopalan, University of Texas at Austin Lee Grieveson, University College London Nick James, Editor, Sight & Sound

Laura Mulvey, Birkbeck College, University of London Alastair Phillips, University of Warwick Dana Polan, New York University B. Ruby Rich, University of California, Santa Cruz Amy Villarejo, Cornell University

Cat People 2nd Edition Kim Newman

A BFI book published by Palgrave Macmillan

For Richard Combs, Steve Jenkins, Jo Imeson, Pam Cook and Janet Hawken © Kim Newman 1999, 2013 First edition published in 1999 by the BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Reprinted 2001, 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author(s) have/has asserted his/her/their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This edition published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN on behalf of the BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk There’s more to discover about film and television through the BFI. Our world-renowned archive, cinemas, festivals, films, publications and learning resources are here to inspire you. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. Front cover design: Graham Humphreys Series text design: ketchup/SE14 Images from Cat People, © RKO Radio Pictures; The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941), © Universal Pictures Company; The Curse of the Cat People (Gunther V. Fritsch/Robert Wise, 1944), © RKO Radio Pictures; Cat People (Paul Schrader, 1982), © RKO Pictures/© Universal Pictures; Catman of Paris (Lesley Selander, 1946), Republic Pictures Corporation. The afterword ‘The Curse of the Cat People’ is an edited version of the article ‘Bring Back the Cat’, originally published in Sight & Sound, November 1999, pp. 22–5. Set by couch This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978–1–84457–643–2 eISBN 978–1–83871–491–8 ePDF 978–1–83871–492–5

Contents

Introduction

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‘Cat People’

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Afterword: The Curse of the Cat People

82

Notes

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Credits

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Bibliography

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Introduction In the thirteen years since the first edition of this book was published, Cat People has receded further into film history. New formats have come and gone: the version of the film I consulted over and over while writing this was on laserdisc, in a beautifully packaged, vinylalbum-sized box that has become itself a nostalgia item. The most easily available contemporary release is on DVD, in the Val Lewton Horror Collection box-set (with Stephen Jones, I contributed an audio commentary to this, for I Walked with a Zombie), though it’s also available on a single-disc double bill with The Curse of the Cat People. There have already been two issues of the nine-film set, with the more recent adding Kent Jones’s Martin Scorsese-endorsed documentary Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (2007); as yet, regrettably, no one has thought to include Mademoiselle Fifi or Youth Runs Wild as extras to complete the set of Lewton’s RKO productions. Presumably, a BluRay edition will appear; if we’re lucky, with the level of craft bestowed on Universal Monsters: The Essential Collection. Highlight scenes and trailers can be found on YouTube, and doubtless the entire film has been uploaded unethically to the internet. The film remains, and endures. Cat People routinely features in Best Of … horror lists and clip-shows. Paul Schrader’s remake is over thirty years old – Quentin Tarantino repurposed David Bowie’s theme song ‘Putting Out the Fire with Gasoline’ in Inglourious Basterds (2009) – and a twenty-first-century reiteration must be in development somewhere. With recent trends like the found-footage horror film and the box-office success of ghost stories and paranormal romances, the genre lessons of Lewton seem to have found more and more application as a counterpoint to the oncedominant strain of explicit or effects-oriented shockers.

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But Cat People isn’t just a bus stop in horror history, noted for its importance but passed by. It remains a fresh, surprising film – seeing it several times in cinemas with audiences during the promotion of this book in 1999 reminded me how well it works even in black and white and with outmoded fashions and language that now have the quaintness of period. It retains its mysteries. I would still be happy to watch it again. Kim Newman, 2013

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‘Cat People’

Everyone agrees that the title came first: Cat People. In March 1942, Russian-born Val Lewton – formerly a pulp novelist, pornographer, publicist, story editor and second-unit producer – left a job with independent David O. Selznick and joined RKO Pictures as a producer. RKO had taken something of a pasting in Hollywood for their sponsorship of Orson Welles, which had led to the astonishing but financially unrewarding Citizen Kane (1941), the compromised release version of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), an almighty feud with William Randolph Hearst, a great deal of footage shot in Brazil for a project that never coalesced, a reputation for overreaching and the downfall of a studio regime. Replacing vicepresident in charge of production George Schaefer, who had brought Welles aboard, was Charles Koerner, who came over from the exhibition side of the business and was charged with executing the studio’s new-minted policy of ‘showmanship, not genius’. Koerner recognised that Lewton had served an apprenticeship with Selznick (who could have given Welles lessons in megalomania, but was forgiven everything for delivering Gone with the Wind rather than Citizen Kane) and was ready to head up a production unit. It is often blithely stated that Koerner hired Lewton to produce B horror pictures,1 but Cat People and its successors2 were never strictly B product. RKO had B units churning out Falcon murder mysteries and Tim Holt Westerns, but Lewton’s horror films were always intended to be modestly budgeted A features and to go out at the top of double bills. If Cat People is to be assessed on a level playing field, it should be compared with Universal’s The Wolf Man (1941) or Paramount’s The Uninvited (1944) not PRC’s The Mad Monster (1942) or Monogram’s The Ape Man (1943).

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Though RKO, briefly headed by David Selznick, had put out King Kong (1932) and that film’s fascinating by-blow The Most Dangerous Game (1932), the studio had not made much of an effort to get into the horror boom inaugurated by the similarly underdog Universal Pictures with Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) and James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931). Instead, the studio – which could more accurately be labelled a distribution outfit since much of its product came from semi-independent producers like Walt Disney – made a name with the Astaire–Rogers musicals. Even Kong can’t quite comfortably be subsumed into the horror genre, since it makes its own rules. However, it was new broom Koerner’s policy that RKO should compete with Universal, which had renewed its lock on the monster franchise with George Waggner’s The Wolf Man, a commercial hit that had added a new monster to their pantheon and a new star (Lon Chaney Jr) to the genre. Lewton’s remit was to make horror films.

The poster

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At RKO, Lewton began assembling a team, depending heavily on his contacts from the Selznick organisation: director Jacques Tourneur, with whom he had worked on the second unit of A Tale of Two Cities (1935), and writer DeWitt Bodeen, who had been a research assistant to Aldous Huxley on a Jane Eyre script that eventually became the 1944 film with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. They tell slightly different stories of how Cat People came to be. According to Tourneur, Val Lewton called me up at RKO one day and said ‘Jacques, I’m going to produce a new picture here, and I’d like you to direct it.’ He said, ‘The head of the studio, Charles Koerner, was at a party last night and somebody suggested to him, “Why don’t you make a picture called Cat People?”’ And Charlie Koerner said to Lewton, ‘I thought about it all night and it kind of bothered me.’ So he called in Lewton and asked him to make the picture.3

Tourneur later added, ‘Val said: “I don’t know what to do.” It was a stupid title and Val, with his good taste, said that the only way to do it was not to make the blood-and-thunder cheap horror movie that the studio expected but something intelligent and in good taste.’4 Bodeen’s version is that Val departed for RKO two weeks before I’d finished my work at Selznick’s, and when I phoned him, as I had promised, he quickly made arrangements for me to be hired at RKO as a contract writer at the Guild minimum, which was then $75 a week. When I reported for work, he ran off for me some US and British horror and suspense movies which were typical of what he did not want to do. We spent several days talking about subjects for the first script. Mr Koerner, who had personally welcomed me on my first day at the studio, was of the opinion that vampires, werewolves and man-made monsters had been overexploited and that ‘nobody has done much with cats’. He added that he had successfully audience-tested a title he considered highly exploitable – Cat People. ‘Let’s see what you can do with that,’ he ordered. When we were back in his office, Val looked at me glumly and said: ‘There’s no helping it – we’re stuck with that title. If you want to get out now, I won’t hold it against you.’

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I had no intention of withdrawing, and he and I promptly started upon a careful examination of the cat in literature. There was more to be examined than we had expected. Val was one of the best-read men I’ve ever known, and the kind of avid reader who retains what he reads. After we had both read everything we could find pertaining to the cat in literature, Val had virtually decided to make his first movie from a short story, Algernon Blackwood’s ‘Ancient Sorceries’, which admirably lends itself to cinematic interpretation and could easily be re-titled Cat People. Negotiations had begun for the purchase of the screen rights when Val suddenly changed his mind. He arrived at his office unusually early and called me in at once. He had spent a sleepless night, he confessed, and had decided that instead of a picture with a foreign setting, he would do an original story laid in contemporary New York. It was to deal with a triangle – a normal young man falls in love with a strange foreign girl who is obsessed by abnormal fears, and when her obsession destroys his love and he turns for consolation to a very normal girl, his office co-worker, the discarded one, beset by jealousy, attempts to destroy the young man’s new love.5

Tourneur’s version of the metamorphosis from ‘Ancient Sorceries’6 to Cat People is that At first, Bodeen wrote Cat People as a period thing but I argued against that. I said that if you’re going to have horror, the audience must be able to identify with the characters in order to be frightened. Now you can identify with an average guy like me, but how can we identify with a Lower Slobovian or a fellow with a big cape? You laugh at that. So we changed to modern period which I think is a good thing.7

Blackwood’s story (1906) has a contemporary setting, but concerns a medieval French town (in architecture not period) inhabited by a sect of devil-worshipping cat people, and a protagonist haunted by ancestral memories of the town’s satanic heyday. Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), Anna Karenina-soundalike central character of Cat People, comes from a Serbian village very like Blackwood’s locale; indeed, the main ‘Ancient Sorceries’ Cat Person is a young girl named Ilsé.

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Lewton originally planned to open with Nazi tanks arriving in Irena’s village, and the invader being attacked at night by a population of werecats, suggesting that the Blackwood tale was first shifted in location before a decision was made to drop his plot and follow Ilsé/Irena – essentially, in Hollywood terms, a ‘Lower Slobovian’ – to New York for a different story. Whatever the truth, and everyone agrees Koerner gave Lewton the title and ordered him to come up with a film that fit, there are foggy patches. If Koerner believed ‘vampires, werewolves and manmade monsters had been over-exploited’ in 1942, he had a low threshold for repetition, since only the ‘man-made monster’ theme had really become standardised (Chaney, Jr had just made a film with that title). In the sound era, there had been precisely five Hollywood vampire movies8 and only three werewolf films.9 However, there was a precedent for what Lewton would call ‘a cat/werewolf’ film in Erle C. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls (1932), an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), though Koerner probably classed it as a ‘man-made monster’ movie, since mad scientist Charles Laughton uses surgery to transform a panther into a woman (Kathleen Burke). Kenton’s film was one of the ‘US and British horror and suspense movies’ Lewton and Bodeen watched. Lewton later argued for his preferred casting on Cat People by stating I’d like to have a girl with a little kitten-face like Simone Simon, cute and soft and cuddly and seemingly not at all dangerous. I took a look at the Paramount picture The Island of Lost Souls and after seeing their much-publicized ‘panther woman’, I feel that any attempt to secure a cat-like quality in our girl’s physical appearance would be absolutely disastrous.10

The Lewton team must have screened The Wolf Man, and probably Stuart Walker’s Werewolf of London (1935) too; my guess is that the brief given the producer was not only to come up with a film that fit the Cat People title but to compete with the Universal hit, on a counterpunching level of following up a Wolf Man with a Cat Woman. Most of

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The competition/ inspiration: Lon Chaney Jr in and as The Wolf Man (1941)

the criticism on Lewton has tried to distance him from the grubby specifics of the horror genre in 1942,11 but a double-billing of The Wolf Man and Cat People suggests that the latter was developed as an ‘answer’ to the former, at once cashing in on the earlier film and providing a ‘corrective’ to its less successful aspects.12 Illustrative of this approach is a memo composed by Lewton outlining what he hoped to do with Cat People. He wrote most of the cat/werewolf stories I have read and all the werewolf stories I have seen on the screen end with the beast gunshot and turning back into a human being after death. In this story, I’d like to reverse the process. For the final scene,

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I’d like to show a violent quarrel between the man and woman in which she is provoked into an assault upon him. To protect himself, he pushes her away, she stumbles, falls awkwardly, and breaks her neck in the fall. The young man, horrified, kneels to see if he can feel her heart beat. Under his hand black hair and hide come up and he draws back to look in horror at a dead, black panther.13

This is, of course, an inverse of the finale of The Wolf Man, in which just-killed werewolf Larry Talbot (Chaney) transforms into his human self. Among other carry-overs from The Wolf Man, and even Werewolf of London, to Cat People are animals that instinctively fear the shapeshifter in human form, an apparently explanatory opening quote (The Wolf Man has a dictionary definition of ‘lycanthropy’), a relationship triangle in which the beast person is an outsider (romantic and cultural) who temporarily bewitches one of a longstanding but low-wattage couple, animal tracks that become human footprints and a ‘psychological’ nightmare montage to prefigure the actual metamorphosis. Larry Talbot and Irena Dubrovna are even killed by similar implements: a silver-headed cane and a swordstick (‘this isn’t silver’). Both films, of course, follow the blueprint of most werewolf movies (and many Jekyll and Hyde pictures): a sympathetic but troubled protagonist suffers from a curse which is at once external (due to heredity or the bite of a werewolf) and an expression of their own character contradictions (usually thwarted sexuality). It seems Lewton was less concerned with finding original material than he was with tackling it in an original manner. The oddest thing Bodeen, Tourneur and all Lewton commentators insist on is a contempt for the title. Bodeen has Lewton in despair, giving him a chance to walk away from such an absurdly titled project, while Tourneur – whose credits at the time included Nick Carter, Master Detective (1939), Phantom Raiders (1940) and Doctors Don’t Tell (1941), and would later direct without complaint films entitled Anne of the Indies (1951) and Way of a Gaucho (1952) – simply sneers at such a ‘stupid title’. What, pray, was a cat/werewolf

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horror movie supposed to be called? Remembrance of Things Past? Cat People seems a simple, evocative, eerie title rather than a 1942 precursor to Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965), Blood Orgy of the She Devils (1973) or Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator (1989). It marks out its territory perfectly, affords both a literal and a metaphoric reading (it’s not called The Cat Woman) and has a resonance that remains seventy years on. Other studios were asking other producers to make films called King of the Zombies (1941), The Corpse Vanishes (1942), The Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942) and The Mad Ghoul (1943), suggesting what a true catchpenny, lurid, unambitious thirst for thrills might have sounded like. Of all Lewton’s assigned titles, only I Walked with a Zombie and The Curse of the Cat People compete in this arena, and he only really resisted the latter. It seems to be important for Lewton’s circle (though perhaps not for the man himself) and his critical admirers to do down the genre in which he did his best work. It is suggested that making a horror film called Cat People is somehow beyond the pale for a serious film-maker in a way that it is not for specialists in other genres to make a Western called Stagecoach (1939), a thriller called Saboteur (1942) or a war movie called Air Force (1943). Just how is Cat People a sillier title than Gone with the Wind (1939) or The Maltese Falcon (1941)? The accounts of Lewton’s depression at being assigned a title come from later years. Is it not more likely, especially given the resulting film, that Lewton – who had written for the pulps as well as read the classics, who knew his Algernon Blackwood from his Ambrose Bierce – reacted on first hearing the title just as anyone else did and does? With a frisson of excitement, intrigue and fear? And, along with his director and writer, a sense of opportunity – here, with Cat People, was a chance to make something that would be noticed, that would establish them all in careers. Cat People, officially RKO Production 386, was shot between 28 July and 21 August, coming in ahead of schedule and, at a cost of $134,000, under budget. There were evidently some rumbles from the front office. Tourneur reported

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We only shot Cat People for a couple weeks. The third day, they were going to fire me. It was very embarrassing. Mr Koerner was in New York when we started shooting. Lew Ostrow was the executive producer and after he saw three days of rushes, he called in Val and said: ‘We’re going to fire this director. I’m going to put somebody else in.’ Val called Koerner but he was still in New York. The next day, he got back, looked at the rushes and said: ‘Leave Jacques alone. He’s doing fine.’14

This might be part of the ‘creation myth’ of any unusual film, though later – on The Curse of the Cat People – Lewton did acquiesce in a request to fire the original director (Gunther von Fritsch, who didn’t go on to direct The Day the Earth Stood Still [1951], West Side Story [1961], The Sound of Music [1965] and Star Trek The Motion Picture [1979]) and replace him with editor Robert Wise (who did). Von Fritsch, incidentally, was dismissed for the one thing low-budget RKO probably found unforgivable, working too slowly and falling behind schedule. Dollar-Book Freud After the RKO logo, the radio tower broadcasting from the surface of a globe, the opening titles of Cat People appear over a painting of a panther in a jungle. The subject matter is perhaps evocative of Rousseau, but this is a black-and-white picture so we’ll never know whether the image – the first of many cat references in artwork and decor that recur throughout the film – has his vibrant colouring. The painting later shows up in Irena’s apartment, though it is the Goya portrait of a child with two cats, which hangs over her mantelpiece, that will be described in The Curse of the Cat People as her favourite picture. Roy Webb’s opening music is a compressed overture (lasting under a minute), segueing from the Morse code of the RKO call sign into a sampling of all the motifs of his score, which include a mysterioso theme and a nursery rhyme-like lullaby. Then, over an image of a figurine of a mounted knight hoisting a sword upon which a cat is speared, we have the quotation:

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Even as fog continues to lie in the valleys, so does ancient sin cling to the low places, the depressions in the world’s consciousness. (Dr Louis Judd, The Anatomy of Atavism)

In The Reality of Terror, Joel E. Siegel asserts that this sentence, ascribed to the psychiatrist who is a major character in Cat People (and who is identified with the sword-wielding knight), comes from Sigmund Freud. This seems not to be the case. J. P. Telotte, in his own study of Lewton,15 notes, ‘I am unable to locate a precise source, particularly since Freud seldom uses the key term here, “sin”, which seems more like an injection of that religious element that recurs throughout the Lewton films. In Freud’s discussion of the relationship between religion and conscience, however, we might discern the broad outlines of this passage. See his Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961, pp. 31–2.’ More boldly, Edmund G. Bansak claims, ‘The quote bears all the earmarks of having been penned by Lewton.’16 Title card

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Whether he wrote this or not, it is certain that the producer contributed heavily to the script of Cat People, and of all his films, without taking credit (except on Bedlam, when a Writer’s Guild ruling forced him to use an old pen-name, ‘Carlos Keith’). Of the writing of Cat People, Tourneur revealed, The first person to join us on that one was writer DeWitt Bodeen. We started reading and talking and then invented this story, out of whole cloth you know. As a script, as a story progression, Cat People is very poor. It was made out of details, little situations, so we had very little structure to work from. In the evenings, I’d go downtown with my wife to the theatre or something, and then we’d drive home about midnight. I’d always drive past Val’s house and the light was always on in the room where he worked. All alone, he’d be rewriting what we had been doing all day. He was the most conscientious guy. Meticulous.17

Bodeen’s own version was that Cat People was a group project. Val had the initial idea, then I did the story on it, and then the screenplay, co-operating entirely with Val and Tourneur, and then Mark Robson, who was going to be the editor, and later with Roy Webb, who wrote the musical background. Tourneur was entirely responsible for the style of Cat People, but if you read the screenplay you would find that everything in the film was in the original script – and that’s simply because it was a group project. Val, Tourneur, myself, Robson – we all talked about it and I put it down on paper.18

In a letter to his mother and sister, Lewton explained his reticence to take credit for his work as a screenwriter: I am and have always been a writer-producer. That does not always mean more money. The reason I do not ordinarily take credit for my very considerable work on my own scripts is that I have a theory that if I take credit, whenever I rewrite another writer’s work, I can very properly be suspected of rewriting merely to get such credit.19

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Meeting Cute The orchestral theme fades into childish barrel organ music. The first live shot replaces the two artwork cats under the titles with a black panther20 prowling its cage in a zoo in Central Park, New York. The camera tracks back to take in a dark-haired woman in a trim suit, its severity muted by a sparkly brooch, who is sketching the big cat. Dissatisfied, she crumples a sheet of paper and tosses it at a hollow treestump waste-bin,21 which she misses. A man in a hat, coat slung over his shoulder, notices the jetsam, and indicates a nearby sign that archly warns against littering: ‘Let no one say, and say to your shame, that all was beauty here before you came.’ This vignette typifies the economy of classical Hollywood narrative circa 1942. The 1982 Paul Schrader remake takes half an hour to get to this point: Oliver and Irena meeting by the panther cage. Irena’s bad aim – she throws like a girl – is the device that brings the couple together, a ‘meeting cute’. Having noticed the paper ball, the man notices the girl and strolls over. He was drinking CocaCola from the bottle, standing next to a blonde woman in a hat who looks from behind like Alice, whom we will meet later, suggesting our hero might even be ditching his date to make a move on the sketch artist. He introduces himself with the blindly original line, ‘You won’t believe this, you’ve probably heard it a dozen times before, but I’ve never known any artists.’ The woman explains, ‘I’m not an artist ... I do sketches for fashion drawings.’ They quibble over whether he should look at her work, but he gives up after she has destroyed two more attempts – one he lobs into the waste-basket with a self-satisfied throw, the other he is quite happy to let fall with the leaves (it is autumn but that unworn coat suggests an Indian summer – this film pays attention to passing seasons). In the woman’s foreign accent, we catch a hint of calculated flirtation (listen to her exaggerated ‘Oh no, it is not good’). The capper to the scene, echoing what we saw under the ‘ancient sin’ quote, is a shot of the tossed-away sketch, seen by us but not the man, which depicts a panther impaled on a sword, suggesting depths to this pleasant-seeming pick-up.

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At the zoo 1: Irena sketches; at the zoo 2: Oliver on the make. Note Alice, to be ditched, on his right

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From the first, the relationship is in trouble. Both partners lie: the man turns out to be a naval draughtsman who himself works at a drawing board and must therefore be at least as familiar with artists as the woman, and that impaled big cat is certainly not a ‘fashion drawing’. The man is clearly the bigger heel, though, since his two concerns – that the woman dispose of her litter properly and that he should get a look at her sketch – are both forgotten within seconds as the woman packs up and moves off. A transitionary fade later, they are walking together along a New York street. He carries her sketching things and they know each other’s names: she is Irena Dubrovna and he (unfortunately for some viewers decades on) is Oliver Reed. Even before the story took shape, Lewton wanted to cast Simone Simon as Irena; she gives the most striking performance in the film. The thirty-one-year-old Franco-Italian actress had been in French movies since 1931, notably as the kitten-carrying wife in Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine (1938), and had spent a fairly unrewarding few years in Hollywood in the 1930s, under contract to 20th Century-Fox (Girls’ Dormitory, 1936; Seventh Heaven, 1937). She had come back to America before the Second World War and taken a minx role in William Dieterle’s All That Money Can Buy (1941), presumably the performance that attracted Lewton’s attention. It seems odd that Lewton and the French-born Tourneur should cast Simon as a Serbian, especially when her intended backstory (a refugee from Nazi invasion) could as easily have been located in France as the Balkans. Perhaps the switch was made when Cat People ceased to be even a loose adaptation of ‘Ancient Sorceries’, which is set in France, and became an ‘original’. Simon would recreate the Irena role in The Curse of the Cat People and play the lead in Mademoiselle Fifi, the most underrated of the Lewton RKO films. Allegedly, Kent Smith won the role of Oliver when Lewton saw the ex-Broadway juvenile cycling past on the lot. He was one of those utility players all studios kept under contract, but had few, barely notable film credits (The Garden Murder Case, 1936; Back Door to

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Heaven, 1939). Ephraim Katz’s The Macmillan International Film Encyclopedia (1994) aptly sums Smith up by noting ‘he was an atypical Hollywood leading man, making up in sincerity for a complete lack of sex appeal’. In Cat People, he is square-faced and solid, a plodder whose only extraordinary aspect is his association with the captivating Simon. Manny Farber would note of Lewton’s casting decisions that ‘his insipidly normal characters ... reminded one of the actors used in small-town movie ads for the local grocery or shoe store’.22 He also returns in The Curse of the Cat People, and is in Youth Runs Wild, the least effective (though still interesting) of the Lewton RKO films. Much later, he was cast by Curtis Harrington in a Lewton tribute TV movie, The Cat Creature (1973). It isn’t just the requirements of a seventy-minute running time that has this relationship moving fast. We sense that Oliver, without quite knowing why, is smitten with Simon and, perhaps because her lip-curling come-ons are delivered to the camera as much as Smith, we too are captivated. After being momentarily disappointed when Irena shakes her head at a clumsy, roundabout attempt to ask her out (he asks her how to spell her name so he can write her a letter, ‘Dear Miss Dubrovna, would you have tea with me?’), Oliver strikes lucky when they pause outside her building and she suggests, with an open invitation, ‘Perhaps, Mr Reed, you would like to have tea in my apartment?’ He chortles, ‘Oh ho, Miss Dubrovna, you make life so simple.’ Inside the building, Oliver discovers an ornate hallway and staircase (left over from The Magnificent Ambersons) and muses, partly as a foreshadowing of the film’s themes and partly to justify the use of the standing set, ‘You know, I never cease to be amazed at what lies behind a brownstone front.’ At the door of Irena’s apartment, we have a moment of hesitation and Oliver notices, ‘You looked at me in such a funny way.’ Hesitantly, she admits, ‘I’ve never had anyone here. You’re the first friend I meet in America ... you might be my first real friend.’ This modification of her earlier brazen front, switching from open dalliance to trembling sensitivity, is convincing on a level below the

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rather flat lines: the confident woman whose sexual frankness makes ‘life so simple’ and the hesitant little girl searching for a ‘real friend’ are both tactics for covering and dealing with the fear of intimacy that will be revealed as the root of Irena’s problems. When she opens the door, Oliver notices a heavy scent. ‘That’s Lalage,’ she says, flirting again, ‘a perfume I use. I like it, perhaps too well. Maybe I use too much of it.’ He is taken with the musk, and muses, ‘It’s not like flowers exactly. It’s like something warm, living.’ Oliver steps into Irena’s perfume-drenched apartment, and we fade almost to black, an unusual stylistic trick in what had seemed to be shaping up as a love scene. Irena’s apartment, with its atmosphere of Lalage, is a major set. When they marry, Oliver moves in – which, even though there is no mention of any wartime housing shortage,23 must be a coup for him, since it’s larger and better-positioned than any fashion artist would be likely to afford. During the film, the apartment is invaded by three people and several animals. To modern, non-smoking sensibilities, it might be On the stairs

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significant that Oliver, Alice and Dr Judd are all 1940s-style cigarette fiends (Alice’s presence in the apartment is signalled by a ghostly puff rising from a chair), while Irena is never seen to smoke. It’s not hard to imagine how violated she feels as the comforting Lalage is polluted by the stench of nicotine. The apartment is just by the park, overlooking the zoo where Irena met Oliver: she can hear the roaring of lions (‘many people in this building complain ... the roaring keeps them awake’) and the cries of the panther (‘it screams like a woman ... I don’t like that’). Given the location of the real zoo (of course, Cat People was shot on studio sets in Hollywood, the park being a leftover from Astaire–Rogers musicals), that would put the address in the low seventies on the East Side. There is some confusion about this: the short stroll the couple take after their meeting (long enough for them to exchange names) covers distance that will later be a cab-ride, though it is also possible for Irena to make a return trip from flat to zoo after being fatally wounded. Good King John The apartment is unlit, though the statue of the knight raising the impaled cat is clearly seen in silhouette. Irena hums a lullaby we recognise from the opening music and stands by the window, beautifully lit. She pretends to be looking dreamily through the net curtain but actually slyly ascertains that Oliver is watching her from the sofa, smoking the first of the film’s many cigarettes. ‘I hadn’t realised how dark it was getting,’ Irena says, turning on a lamp. ‘I like the dark, it’s friendly.’ Two people, not even talking, staying together into the evening, not noticing the shadows creeping up: it’s an extremely effective, unusual shorthand for the process of falling in love (which must always happen swiftly in films, ten minutes after the titles) but also has a sinister feel, suggesting that this couple need deliberately to leave parts of their lives in the dark (he’s already got a girl, she thinks she’s a cat werewolf) to get together.

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After Irena has cleared away the tea things, Oliver notices the statuette. It is almost comically large and grotesque (like the wolfhead cane that serves a similar talking-point plot function in The Wolf Man). When Oliver is told that it is of King John, he muses, ‘Oh, the Magna Carta and all that stuff’ and Irena corrects him, ‘No, King John of Serbia. He was a fine king. He drove the Mamelukes out of Serbia and freed the people.’ Oliver asks, ‘Why is he spearing that cat?’ and Irena explains: Oh, it’s not really a cat. It’s meant to represent the evil ways into which my village had once fallen. You see, the Mamelukes came to Serbia long ago and they made the people slaves. Well, at first, the people were good and worshipped God in a true Christian way. But little by little, the people changed. When King John drove out the Mamelukes and came to our village, he found dreadful things. People bowed down to Satan and said their masses to him. They had become witches and were evil, but King John put some of them to the sword and some, the wisest and most wicked, escaped into the mountains … their legend haunts the village where I was born. In the dark

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This sounds like a precis of the backstory of ‘Ancient Sorceries’ and, unsurprisingly, has little to do with real (as opposed to symbolic) Balkan history. The Belgrade-born film-maker Dušan Makavejev once used Cat People in a lecture about the potential for beastliness demonstrated by the Serbs with catastrophic results at least twice in this century. He reported that there was no such historical personage as King John, and that John isn’t even a credible Serbian name. The Mamelukes, an Islamic faction of Kipchuk Turks, are best remembered for their control of Egypt in the Middle Ages, and can hardly be said to have enslaved Serbia. Nevertheless, Serbia (as opposed to the Transylvania of Dracula, the Tibet of Werewolf of London or the Wales of The Wolf Man) lends Cat People more specific meanings, resonating back to Sarajevo in 1914 and the first shot of a European descent into mass insanity close to lycanthropy, and forward to the fracturing of Yugoslavia into a bloody mess of ethnic cleansing (especially with regards to the enmity between Christian and Muslim) and shattered communities. The knight on horseback looks far more like our image of a medieval western European, suggesting again that perhaps Irena Dubrovna was once more likely to have a name like that sported by the Berlin-born Nastassja Kinski in the remake, Irena Gallier. The speech sets up what comes later: what Irena says is less important than the conviction with which she says it. After lightly teasing Oliver with ‘perhaps you have in your room a picture of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln’, she poses by the mantelpiece – a chiming clock interrupts her before she reveals too much – and is visibly affected by the legend she recounts, even frightened. Only later will we discover that the ‘wisest and most wicked’ of the witches were able to transform themselves into cats. Perhaps because of Tourneur and Bodeen’s embarrassment, the expression ‘cat people’ is most often used with contempt by sceptics and cynics who are trying to shake Irena out of her beliefs. Yet, throughout her speech, she is also seducing Oliver, casting him as the knight in armour who will rescue her. He leaves with ‘boys who

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come to tea can’t expect to stay for dinner’, but they make a date to have dinner the next evening. Oliver walks down that elaborate staircase, and Irena, pleased with herself, watches him from the balcony, excited and smiling in anticipation. It is one of the few scenes in the film that doesn’t end with foreboding. C. R. Cooper Ship and Barge Construction Co. In a scene running only a minute or so, we leave Irena’s shadowed world of zoo and apartment to see Oliver in his airy, light workplace. The set, redressed from The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), is a blatant contrast, with workmen on ladders against stark white walls, and draughtsmen toiling over boards. Alice Moore (Jane Randolph), a perky Girl Friday-type blonde, briskly walks through the office on some busy-work (filing), when her attention is caught by a kitten’s mew (which sounds like a kazoo or, more likely, a human being’s imitation of a miaow – Dorothy Lloyd is credited with ‘cat voices’) that she tracks to a shoebox on Oliver’s drawing board. Did New Yorkers in the 1940s really buy pets in boxes? Whether likely or not, it’s a neat little image of Oliver’s ambitions for Irena. The kitten is briefly the centre of attention, which allows the film to introduce Oliver and Alice’s office friends: the Commodore (Jack Holt), who chuckles, ‘You’re not going in for cats are you, Oliver?’, and the sardonic Doc Carver (Alan Napier), who deduces, ‘We arrive at the inescapable conclusion that our Oliver has a girl.’ The lanky Napier (later, Alfred the butler on Batman) would be a returnee to the Lewton unit in Mademoiselle Fifi and Isle of the Dead, but the brusque Jack Holt (who gets billing with the principals in the opening title) was a former action star given a token role to wind up a long-standing contract. The characters are only in the film to lend it a feeling of real life, populating the world of the drama in a way a real B production would never trouble to, just as the whole business of Oliver’s job (and Irena’s) would have seemed an unnecessary frill to a Universal or PRC writer.

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The point of the scene, as revealed by the way Tourneur always centres his camera on Jane Randolph, is to introduce our third major player. ‘I’m a new type of other woman,’ Alice says later, suggesting exactly how the contrary Lewton and Bodeen must have come up with the character: if the ‘other woman’ in a regular film is supposed to be an exotic vamp with a foreign accent (like the wife here), then the Cat People ‘other woman’ will be a bustling, down-to-earth working girl who looks more suited to helpmeet roles than seducing a man away from his wife. Alice is clearly interested in the change in Oliver’s romantic status; he blithely tells her, ‘I know you’ll like her,’ whereupon she plasters a smile on her face and lies right back to him with ‘If you like her, she’s okay with me.’ Oliver and Alice are no more capable of being honest with each other than Oliver and Irena, and their settle-forless partnership at the end of the film sets up perfectly the marriage we see in The Curse of the Cat People, where their insensitivity to their daughter’s imagination is on a par with their insensitivity to Irena’s honest plight (‘it’s almost as if she were Irena’s daughter’). The gang at C. R. Cooper Ship and Barge Construction Co.

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Jane Randolph, who returns in the sequel, is literally the unsung heroine of Cat People, doing something interesting with a role conceived as secondary and guaranteed to seem more unsympathetic to modern audiences than it did at the time. Randolph was cast after Lewton failed to get Phyllis Isley, who would soon become Jennifer Jones and be boosted by David Selznick for Irena parts rather than Alice roles. Alice’s sufferings are never on a par with Irena’s, though she is menaced in the film’s two major ‘scare’ sequences, but Randolph catches exactly the subliminal spasm Alice has when she learns Oliver, who has always treated her as a pal while she was calculatedly adoring him, has taken a fancy to some foreign chit. She is stuck with the worst speech in the film – as she admits to Oliver that she loves him – and more or less gets away with it, and generously gives Simon room to be complicated while suggesting just how clever Alice is in her narrow-focus campaign to win back a man who has married someone else. She is also the super-capable 1940s career woman of film and fiction, whose skills extend to locating the only Serbian restaurant in New York. In this scene, the kitten is an unusual element on the premises of C. R. Cooper (the Commodore?), but later they have acquired an office cat, John Paul Jones.24 Does Alice import the animal, named after an American Admiral25 who saw off a foreign foe, to keep up with Oliver’s cat-collecting habits? The Cat and the Canary When Oliver presents Irena, at her door, with the kitten, she is charmed but the animal draws away and hisses (warning notes sound in the score). ‘Why, you little devil,’ Oliver protests. Irena is resigned, ‘It’s just that cats don’t seem to like me.’ Oliver won’t let the puzzle drop, musing that the kitten played with Alice (‘that’s the girl who works in our department’), but Irena distracts him with a suggestion that they exchange the kitten for some other pet. The pet shop scene is the film’s first real suggestion of the supernatural (‘animals are ever so psychic’). When Irena, wearing a

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fetching check coat, enters the cramped store, the animals all react with noisy fright. ‘I can’t imagine what’s got into them, all that caterwauling,’ wonders the proprietress. ‘The last time they did that was when an alley cat got in and ate up one of my nice white finches!’ The racket is such that conversation is impossible; Oliver, Irena and the proprietress have to go outside – in driving rain that adds to the busy sound-effects track – to talk. Irena and the proprietress know at once what the trouble is and Irena stays in the rain while Oliver and the woman step back into the calmed store (‘as peaceful as my dream of heaven’) and negotiate the exchange of cat for canary (a ‘little lemon-coloured fellow with top notes like Caruso’). The proprietress, one of the film’s string of eccentric women, knows ‘there are some people who just can’t come in here … you can fool everybody, but landy dearie me, you can’t fool a cat. They seem to know who’s not right, if you know what I mean.’ Oliver hands the fragile bird (in a box wrapped in newspaper) over to a satisfied Irena, and she declares, ‘Oh, he is sweet. He will like me very much, you will see. I like to be liked.’ In the pet shop

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As previously noted, this is hardly an original scene. The protagonists of Werewolf of London and The Wolf Man are also shunned by otherwise friendly dogs and cats, and the animal who is sensitive to supernatural dangers unperceived by its master is a cliché of ghost stories. Variations on the scene recur in a great many horror movies, most extravagantly as the monkeys at a wildlife park erupt into a frenzy of chittering at the presence of the Antichrist in The Omen (1976). Lewton had originally planned an extra twist: ‘I’d like to show the chattering fear that arises upon her entrance. At the very height of the uproar, I would like to have a little black cat come down the centre aisle of the store, very calmly, and rub affectionately against the girl.’26 As it stands, one wonders why the canary isn’t as afraid, or more so, of Irena as all the other animals: he certainly has more cause, both in the traditional Sylvester-and-Tweety enmity of their species and in view of what happens to him later. A similar question hangs around the two caged love-birds in The Birds (1963), which fail to join in the rebellion of the rest of their kind. S. S. Prawer notes ‘the incidents involving a gift of caged birds at the opening of Hitchcock’s The Birds, which have no equivalent in the Daphne du Maurier story on which that film is based, are so close to the opening passages of Cat People that they might almost be seen as a conscious act of homage.’27 This is perhaps overstating the case, though Lewton was clearly a major influence (still barely recognised) on Hitchcock. Other echoes of Cat People appear in Vertigo (1963), with a hero drawn away from a smitten working girl to become bewitched by a supernatural beauty, and Marnie (1964), whose hero knowingly marries a frigid woman who can only be aroused in connection with violence and criminality. After the light but ominous banter of the pet shop, the film darkens and turns serious along with the characters, who play out their own cat-and-canary courtship. Back in Irena’s shadowy apartment, Oliver has been so captivated by her company that he has fallen asleep (‘couldn’t have been very entertaining for you’) and she has been

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watching him in the dark. When he wakes, Oliver asks Irena, ‘Do you love me, Irena?’ and, after she has nodded, expounds, ‘You know I love you, don’t you?’ This is the crucial moment of any love story, any relationship, and again the writing tries to avoid flat-out cliché while adding an ominous note. ‘I’ve never kissed you,’ Oliver says. ‘Do you know, that’s funny. … When people in America are in love, or even think they’re in love, they’ve usually kissed long ago.’ Irena freezes, bites her lip, looks down and murmurs, ‘I’ve lived in dread of this moment, I’ve never wanted to love you. I’ve stayed away from people, I lived alone. … I’ve fled from the past, some things you could never know, or understand … evil things, evil.’ Oliver brushes aside her protests, incidentally using the film’s title for the first time as he admits she’s told him about ‘the witches and the cat people descended from them’ and that they’re only ‘fairytales’. In one of the least reassuring speeches in the cinema, which incidentally contains not a proposal but an announcement of marriage, Oliver tells her: ‘You’re here in America, you’re so normal you’re even in love with me, Oliver Reed, a good plain Americano. You’re so normal you’re going to marry me, and those fairy-tales, you can tell ’em to our children. They’ll love ’em.’28 Oliver and Irena are engaged to be married, but they still don’t really kiss (he touches chaste lips to the top of her head); indeed, they never do. In the next scene, they are married. ‘Moia sestra, moia sestra?’ After what we assume is a small civil wedding, Oliver and Irena, and the gang from Oliver’s department, celebrate at the Belgrade, a cramped Serbian restaurant where they feast from a cauldron at the table and fez-wearing musicians (Mamelukes?) play in the background. Again, passage of time is conveyed by a significant change in the weather: it is snowing. The Commodore tells Alice, ‘Oliver’s bride seems to be a very nice girl, and a very pretty one too. … Carver tells me she’s a bit odd. He’s worried about the marriage.’ Loyal to Oliver, Alice unconvincingly pooh-poohs the gossip,

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‘Nonsense, Irena’s a grand girl. She and Oliver are going to be very happy together.’ In one of the film’s eeriest moments, a woman (Elizabeth Russell) at the bar notices Irena as the company toast the bride. Strikingly thin, with a black cat-ears bow in her hair, a shimmering sheath dress and a fur wrap, her expression conveys tragedy and misery. Russell, always a remarkable presence, returns in different roles in both of the Cat People semi-sequels, as the consumptive Mimi in The Seventh Victim and the neglected daughter of the great actress in The Curse of the Cat People, and also as Boris Karloff’s wife in Bedlam. The Commodore points her out with ‘Look at that woman, isn’t she something?’ and Carver snipes, ‘Looks like a cat!’ The Cat Woman stands over the table, eyes fixed on Irena, and asks, ‘Moia sestra, moia sestra?’ Getting only a frozen look in reply, she drifts out into the snow, accompanied by a haunting echt-Serbian tune. ‘She greeted me,’ Irena explains, ‘she called me “sister”. … You saw what she looked like.’ Oliver, sensing that the prospects for

The other Cat Woman

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his wedding night have just died, tries to jolly her out of her convictions with impatience and cynicism, ‘She looks like a cat so she must be one of the cat people, one of King John’s pets.’ As Irena sits, suddenly cold and sober, Oliver playfully punches her and chides, ‘Oh Irena, you crazy kid!’ In a genre supposedly committed to the mysterious but too often given to explaining everything, the Cat Woman is a master stroke. Actually, both Werewolf of London and The Wolf Man have secondary lycanthropes whose paths cross with the protagonist, but they are in the films to pass on the curse, not share it. Bodeen noted: Some audience members read a lesbian meaning into the action. I was aware that could happen with the cafe scene, and Val got several letters after Cat People was released, congratulating him for his boldness in introducing lesbiana to films in Hollywood. … Actually, I rather liked the insinuation and thought it added a neat bit of interpretation to the scene. Irena’s fears about ‘Moia sestra, moia sestra?’

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destroying a lover if she kissed him could be because she was really a lesbian who loathed being kissed by a man.29

Though this reading makes sense, it is also too reductive; it would be as logical to assume the Cat Woman is Irena’s actual sister, separated by the Second World War or some family tragedy. The truth, apparently, is that this character is a Cat Person, who has obviously prospered despite (or because of) her curse. It’s tempting to wonder about her story – how did she come to America? What happens to her after Irena’s death? Does she become the last of the Cat People? But we never see her again.30 Lady in the Dark The encounter has reminded Irena of what she is, and prompts her to duck out of her marital obligations. Carver makes a corny joke about marriage (‘Why would my wedding be a dollars and cents wedding?… because I haven’t a dollar and the girl hasn’t any sense!’) as the gang drop Oliver and Irena off outside her building. In the snow, Irena, accent thickening, explains, ‘I wanna be Mrs Reed really, I wanna be everything that name means to me, but I can’t, I can’t.’ Simon treads a thin line between poignance and bathos with lines that can’t help but seem awkward, though they’re convincingly the sort of thing a terrified, romantic virgin whose first language isn’t English might say: ‘Oliver, be kind, be patient, let me have time, time to get over that feeling there’s something evil in me.’ The aspect of Cat People most astonishing to modern audiences is the frank treatment of frigidity within marriage, demonstrated as Oliver consents to bed down on the couch (‘Darling, you can have all the time in the world, and all the patience and kindness there is in me’) while Irena crouches against the door of her bedroom, hand pawing the door like claws, torn apart by desire and fear, the mewling of the panther echoing on the soundtrack. Films in the 1940s just weren’t about subjects like this;31 the only comparison that comes to mind is Lady in the Dark (1944), a ponderous and

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Visiting time

At the door

Irene at work

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roundabout adaptation of the Broadway musical about psychoanalysis. A month later, Irena is drawn back to the panther at the zoo. ‘No one comes to see him when they’re happy,’ claims the keeper (Alec Craig), ‘monkey house and the aviary get all the happy customers.’ The keeper, who fulfils the ominous peasant role of the traditional horror film, cautions of the panther, ‘He ain’t beautiful, he’s an evil critter, ma’am.’ He quotes from Revelations, ‘Where the book’s talking about the worst beast of ’em all … “and the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard” … like a leopard, but not a leopard.’ The omens continue as Irena is distracted from a ‘fashion drawing’ (which looks like Elizabeth Russell in an evening dress) by the canary, which ‘dies of fright’ when she puts her hand into the cage to play with it. Returning to the zoo, she tosses the dead bird to the panther. Her aim has improved since the opening scene, and she manages a very tricky throw through the bars to the beast. This little incident, which she puts down to a compulsion (‘When I went past the panther’s cage, I had to open the box’), prompts a fit of despair about her envy of ‘every woman I see on the street’ (Alice?). Oliver tries to comfort her about the bird by admitting, ‘I had a rabbit once that hated me, yet I grew up to be quite a nice feller,’ but is forced to take her seriously again, concluding, ‘Irena, I’ve been trying to kid you out of it, maybe that’s wrong. … I’ve tried to make you realise all these stories that worry you are so much nonsense, but now I see it’s not the stories, it’s the fact you believe them – we’ve got to have help, Irena.’ She looks at the impaled cat statue and Oliver assures her, ‘Not that sort of help, there’s something wrong and we have to face it in an intelligent way. We don’t need a King John with fire and sword, we need someone who can find the reason for your belief and cure it … that’s what we need, a psychiatrist.’ Irena consents, ‘Find one for me, Oliver, the best one, the very best one.’ Given the way Tourneur has lit the film so far, it should be no surprise that the psychiatrist Irena goes to works in almost total

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darkness. With a tight spotlight on the face of his hypnotised patient, he asks questions from the shadows like the reporter in Citizen Kane. ‘You were saying the cats … ?’ he prompts. ‘Torment me,’ Irena admits. ‘I wake in the night and the tread of their feet whispers in my brain. I have no peace, for they are in me.’ The analyst opens the curtains, switches off the spotlight, makes a note, nudges Irena awake, purrs ‘hypnosis always tires me’ and offers a glass of water. The shrink is Dr Louis Judd, author of The Anatomy of Atavism, and played by Tom Conway, George Sanders’s less-expensive brother.32 Conway would return as the same Dr Judd (somewhat changed) in The Seventh Victim and also took a role in I Walked with a Zombie; a contract player in suave roles, who could do sincere or sinister, he is ideal as the untrustworthy lech (‘The way he goes around kissing hands makes me want to spit cotton,’ admits Alice, who has nevertheless recommended him, ‘but I guess he knows all there is to know about psychiatry’) who considers seduction a viable therapy and carries a sword-cane for no real

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reason (perhaps he has other attractive lady patients with potentially angry husbands?). In the 1940s, the psychiatrist became a familiar figure in Hollywood films, perhaps because Hollywood film-makers were in the forefront of those American professionals to seek solace in psychoanalysis. Though there lingered the memory of the Svengalilike Dr Caligari and Poe’s Dr Tarr and Professor Fether, madmen who tinker sadistically with the minds of their patients, there was a move in films like Blind Alley (1939), with Ralph Bellamy as a pipesmoking ‘head doctor’ who interprets the dreams of a neurotic gangster, to get away from the bearded little old Viennese image of psychiatry established by Freud and present more ‘normal’ headshrinkers. The hero of Dracula’s Daughter (1936) (Otto Kruger) is a suave London society analyst who ventures to treat the title character’s fairly explicable Electra complex, and from The Crime Doctor (1943) on, Columbia cranked out a series with Warner Baxter as a sleuth psychoanalyst, who helps diagnose (in The Crime Doctor’s Courage, 1944) at least one case of Dubrovna syndrome, a ballet dancer who fears she has inherited a vampire curse. Dr Judd, as we shall see, was intended to be a misleadingly convincing, helpful character but Lewton evidently had a mistrust of the profession (cf. Bedlam) and exposes the apparently benign analyst as a selfinterested, shifty, unethical creep. Under hypnosis, Irena (‘I’m so ashamed, it must seem so childish’) has told Judd of ‘the cat woman of your village … women who in jealousy or anger or out of their corrupt passions, can turn into great cats like panthers. And if one of these women were to fall in love, and if her lover were to kiss her, take her into his embrace, she would be driven by her own evil to kill him. That’s what you believe and fear, isn’t it?’ She nods. With bland reassurance, he tells her: these things are very simple to psychiatrists. You told me about your childhood, perhaps we’ll find this trouble stems from some early experience.

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You said you didn’t know your father, that he died in some mysterious accident in the forest before your birth, and because of that the children teased you and called your mother a witch, a cat woman. These childhood tragedies are inclined to corrode the soul, to leave a canker in the mind. But we’ll try to repair the damage.

When Irena asks Judd what she should tell her husband (‘naturally, he’s anxious to have some word’), he helps her on with her coat, smoothly suggesting, ‘What does one tell a husband, one tells him nothing.’ Make no mistake, the animals in the pet shop were psychic: this is not – though many commentators have said it is or ought to be33 – a respectable psychological study of a woman with a neurosis; Cat People is a horror film about a woman who turns into a panther. Too much writing about Lewton is embarrassed that such a tasteful man should have made horror pictures, and many of the anecdotes about On the couch

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its making suggest some tension between a philistine front office eager for a lurid cat werewolf movie and a daring band of filmmakers intent on slipping them a serious film about psychiatry instead. Lewton himself made his intentions clear in his early notes about the character of Dr Judd, whom he planned as a man, possibly a doctor, who always gives the scientific or factual explanations for any phenomena that occur, brushing the supernatural aside, and yet, who is always proved wrong by the events on the screen. This device, I hope, will express the audiences’ doubts even before they are fully formulated in their minds and quickly answer them, thus lending a degree of credibility to the yarn, which is going to be difficult to achieve.34

The innovation of Cat People was not ambiguity – which often in horror films serves merely as a respectable get-out clause, allowing audiences who don’t recognise the validity of supernatural stories to read fantastical events as symptoms of a deranged mind (cf. The Innocents, 1961) – but subtlety. Lewton decreed: We tossed away the horror formula right from the beginning. No grisly stuff for us. No mask-like faces hardly human, with gnashing teeth and hair standing on end. No creaking physical manifestations. No horror piled on horror. You can’t keep up horror that’s long sustained. It becomes something to laugh at. But take a sweet love story, or a story of sexual antagonisms, about people like the rest of us, not freaks, and cut in your horror here and there by suggestion, and you’ve got something. Anyhow, we think you have. That’s the way to do it.35

For Lewton, the special-effects lycanthropy of The Wolf Man simply wasn’t frightening enough, and the domestication of the Universal Monsters into well-loved children’s figures suggests that he was right. Though Irena never sports yak-hair and fangs, Cat People is unambiguous about her status: the film’s last line (‘she never lied to us’), along with details like transforming footprints and a shredded bathrobe, proves that Irena really is a Cat Person. Dr Judd interprets

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what she tells him as a childhood trauma, but we are supposed to understand what really happened before Irena was born: her father made love to her mother in the forest, impregnating her, and she transformed into a panther and killed him. The lesson is not that a psychological study is more worthy than a cat werewolf movie, but that a horror film can have psychological depth. That Irena is a Cat Person doesn’t make the film any less affecting as the story of a troubled marriage. Jealousy Irena returns from her session with Judd to find Alice cosily installed in her apartment, sharing a haze of cigarette smoke with Oliver (Alice probably hates Lalage as much as she does hand-kissing psychiatrists). When Irena learns that Alice has recommended Dr Judd and that Oliver has confided their marital problems in them, she is upset but also calculatingly cruel: she turns her back and coos ‘Goodbye, Alice.’ After the interloper has left, Irena turns on her

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husband with ‘How can you discuss things, such intimate things about me,’ but he blithely assures her that ‘You can tell Alice anything, she’s such a good egg she can understand anything.’ Irena upbraids him, ‘There are some things a woman doesn’t want other women to understand.’ The emotional mood of the film has shifted: from now on, Irena’s dominant motive is not a struggle against her Cat Person heritage but jealousy of Alice – in fact, she increasingly comes to accept her animal nature. At night, she gets out of bed and visits the zoo (how does she get in?), wearing a fur over a long dress (like the Cat Woman). Oliver is awake when she gets back, and contrite to the point of almost a sob; she lies to him about her excursion (‘just walked’) but sets out the truth, in a speech which is as much threat as plea: ‘Oliver, we should never quarrel, never let me feel jealousy or anger. Whatever it is that’s in me is held in, is kept harmless, when I’m happy.’ Oliver vows unconvincingly, ‘I’ll turn handsprings, darling. I’ll dance in the streets to make you happy.’ Tourneur insists in this scene that this is Irena’s agony, not Oliver’s: though Kent Smith’s strained voice is the most emotional he is ever shown to be in the movie – by comparison, his disappointment on the uneventful wedding night is hesitant and subdued – but the conversation unfolds in a single take, with Irena well lit in the centre of the screen and Oliver’s back to us, face barely registering. Did the director even shoot a take of Oliver’s face in close-up for the scene? And how did Smith feel having his best moment squashed by editing and direction? The next scene finds Oliver and Alice at work, with Alice noticing Oliver’s distraction (‘That’s the third wrong figure you’ve given me this morning … must be marriage’) and Oliver immediately breaking his implied promise to Irena by taking a cigarette break at the water cooler with Alice and confiding more of his troubles to her. Oliver has just found out that Irena hasn’t kept her subsequent appointments with Dr Judd, and is starting to worry (at last!) about himself rather than his wife. ‘You know, it’s a funny thing, I’ve never been unhappy before. Things have always gone swell for me. I had a

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grand time as a kid, lots of fun at school, here at the office with you and the Commodore and Doc. That’s why I don’t know what to do about all this, I’ve just never been unhappy.’ Alice turns away, starting to sniffle, and Oliver finally notices her problem. ‘I can’t bear to see you unhappy,’ she admits. ‘I love you too darn much, and I don’t care if you do know it, Ollie. I love you.’ She backs off (or pretends to), telling him that he’s in love with Irena, but he shrugs, ‘I don’t know. All this trouble has made me think, I don’t know what love really is. I don’t know even whether I’m in love with Irena.’ Then Alice has the film’s worst speech, Bodeen and Lewton’s idea of an office girl’s poetry: ‘I know what love is, it’s understanding. It’s you and me and let the rest of the world go by. Just the two of us living our lives together, happily and proudly. No self-torture and no doubt. It’s enduring and it’s everlasting. Nothing can change it. Nothing can change us, Ollie. That’s what I think love is.’ Oliver shakes his head: ‘Well, that’s not the way I feel about Irena. It’s a different feeling. I’m drawn to her. There’s a warmth from her that pulls at me. I have to watch her when she’s in the room. I have to touch her when she’s near. But I don’t really know her. In many ways, we’re strangers.’ Alice, having hooked her man but not understood him, says, ‘You and I, we’ll never be strangers.’ She walks back to her drafting table, and he follows. This flatly-shot, rather prosily-written scene is curiously affecting: Smith and Randolph sense that they have a moment on screen without competition from Simon, and struggle for the meaning in their lines as their characters struggle with a world beyond their comprehension. Given that the scare stuff in the rest of the film depends upon an audience empathising with Alice, who is the possible victim in the two famous stalking sequences, this scene is also supposed to make us to some extent write off our sympathy for Irena and think more fondly of Alice. If Irena is the monster, then Alice is, after all, the heroine. Though the fright scenes work, demonstrating that it’s possible for audiences to be unnerved on behalf of an unsympathetic character, nothing could make us really

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like the calculating Alice or the cloddish Oliver. Is it possible that square audiences of the time identified with these limited ‘Americanos’ and were repulsed by the sinisterly foreign Irena? If so, it’s a bizarre effect for a film directed and produced by immigrants, a Frenchman and a Russian. Back at the zoo, a tiny but crucial plot point is made. Irena notices that the keeper has left his key in the lock of the panther cage and returns it to him. ‘Oh, I’m always forgettin’ it,’ he admits. ‘T’ain’t no worry in it. Nobody’d want to steal one of them critters.’ Dr Judd, who has been loitering on the assumption that she will show up eventually (‘You told me many things’), congratulates a suddenly frosty Irena on resisting temptation admirably. ‘There is in some cases a psychic need to loose evil upon the world, and we all of us carry within us a desire for death. You fear the panther, yet you’re drawn to him, again and again. Couldn’t you turn to him as an instrument of death?’ Irena explains why she hasn’t continued her therapy: ‘When you speak of the soul, you mean the mind and it is not my mind that is troubled.’ Smugly, Judd responds, ‘What a clever girl, all the psychologists have tried for years to find that subtle difference between mind and soul and you’ve found it.’ Admitting ‘It does seem presumptuous of me,’ she brushes him off and leaves. At the apartment, Irena and Oliver have another discussion of their problems. ‘People can still drift apart,’ Oliver says. ‘We don’t talk together openly. You’re not frank with me.’ Somewhat testily, Irena insists, in what is almost her catchphrase, ‘I’ve never lied to you.’ While trying to get her to go back to Dr Judd, Oliver makes the mistake of mentioning Alice and then has to go out (‘I’ve got some work to do’) to avoid a quarrel. Instead of going to the office, he retreats to Sally Lunn’s, a cafe on the corner, where he disconsolately orders American comfort food, apple pie and a cup of coffee from Minnie (Theresa Harris), a pleasant young black waitress (‘My goodness, don’t nobody like chicken gumbo?’). Irena, perhaps hoping to make up, phones the creepily shadowed office (the light source is a drafting table which lights up from below like an x-ray display), gets

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Spying; John Paul Jones

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Alice and hangs up without identifying herself. Alice addresses the office cat, ‘John Paul Jones, don’t you hate people who do that?’ Suspicious, Irena takes her fur coat and goes out. In the lobby, Alice gives some matchbooks to a slatternly but fastidious cleaning woman (‘Oh, Chartreuse, ain’t that elegant’) and is told Oliver has just been by. She naturally heads over to Sally Lunn’s to share Oliver’s troubles (‘mmm, stormy weather’), and Irena, self-possessed and sinister, spies on them from the street. ‘Alice, you’re very swell,’ Oliver concludes. ‘That’s what makes me dangerous,’ Alice admits. As far as Irena is concerned, Oliver and Alice are now a couple, and Alice is her enemy. ‘A cat just walked over my grave’ As they leave Sally Lunn’s, Oliver notices Alice shivering and asks, ‘You cold?’ She replies, in a line that is perhaps too on-the-nose, ‘A cat just walked over my grave.’ He offers to walk her home but she independently declares, ‘No thanks, I’m a big girl now and I’m not afraid.’ Though brief and uneventful by modern standards, when a stalking scene can go on for twenty minutes or more, the Central Park walk sequence was intended as one of the scare highlights of Cat People. It is the first real indication, after all the psychological stuff, that the film’s ‘monster’ might actually hurt someone other than herself. It also pays off with a moment calculated to make the entire audience jump.36 Alice sets out to walk through the park alone at night, a concept modern audiences probably find more terrifying than those of 1942, and Irena, her face a determined blank, follows. Tourneur and editor Mark Robson – both of whom would return to this sort of ‘walk’ in subsequent work – cut from full shots to closeups as Alice’s pace picks up and she hurries through the pools of dark between shafts of light. Then she is isolated entirely in a black screen, the formerly chipper career girl shrinking like a terrorised silent movie ingénue. The scene is a showpiece for cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, art directors Albert S. D’Agostino and Walter E. Keller and, especially, sound recordist John L. Cass. Footsteps click

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on concrete and Alice realises someone is behind her, but the scary moment for her comes when she can no longer hear the footsteps of a pursuer she knows is still there. She starts to run in panic, and is brought up short as a bus glides swiftly into the frame with a panther-like hiss of air-brakes. Of the Lewton cycle, Mark Robson explained: In each of these films we had what we called the ‘bus’, an editing device I had invented by accident, or possibly by design, on Cat People, that was calculated to terrify people and make them jump out of their seats. It derived from a sequence in Cat People in which a girl was walking through the transverse in New York’s Central Park, imagining that she was being followed by somebody or something one supposed could be a cat of some sort, a leopard possibly, though one couldn’t tell. Looking over her right shoulder in terror, this girl backed away from the mysterious sound, ready to accept anything that might jump on her. From the other side of the park a bus came by, and I put a big, solid sound of air-brakes on it, cutting it in at the decisive moment so that it The bus

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knocked viewers out of their seats. This became the ‘bus’, and we used the same principle in every film.37

The trick is now so much a part of the horror movie repertoire that it is hard to imagine anyone inventing it: John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) is constructed around its ‘busses’, and features a villain who seems to take a delight in contriving them; the Schrader remake of Cat People pulls a clever trick by restaging the park scene almost exactly but having Alice (Annette O’Toole) scared by the sudden appearance of a barking hound, allowing for a ‘bus’ and a moment of relief, then having a New Orleans bus show up to prove you can bite twice and make it work. The ‘bus’ is a punchline, but the stalking sequence is the setup, and demonstrates the quality for which Lewton’s horror films were famous: darkness. In an interview, Lewton boasted, ‘I’ll tell you a secret: if you make the screen dark enough, the mind’s eye will read anything into it you want! We’re great ones for dark patches. Remember the long walk alone at night in Cat People? Most people will swear they saw a leopard move in the hedge above her – but they didn’t! Optical illusion; dark patch.’ 38 This may well be hyperbole – as Alice gets on the bus, we do see obviously disturbed trees – but it has entered Hollywood mythology. In Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Kirk Douglas plays Jonathan Shields, a B movie producer assigned to make The Doom of the Cat Men; unimpressed by the tatty cat man costumes in studio stock, he muses, ‘What scares the human race more than any other thing … the dark. Why? Because the dark has a life of its own. In the dark, all sorts of things come alive. Suppose we never do show the cat man … now what we put on the screen will make the backs of their necks crawl.’ Later, after the film has been successfully sneak-previewed (with Anna Karenina), Shields congratulates himself with ‘We took a five cent story, a twelve cent budget and a two cent leading man, and we put it over.’39

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Stalker; stalked

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The scene has been re-evaluated by Stephen King: I am sure the Central Park scene worked for audiences of the forties, but today it simply will not wash; even out in the sticks, audiences would hoot and laugh at it. … Take a moment to look at it closely and you’ll see it is not Central Park at all. It’s a set built on a soundstage. A little thought will suggest a reason why. Tourneur, who wanted to be in control of lighting at all times, didn’t elect to shoot on a set; he simply had no choice. ‘The state of the art’ in 1942 did not allow for night shooting on location. So instead of shooting in daylight with a heavy filter, a technique that shows up as even more glaringly faked, Tourneur quite sensibly opted for the soundstage. … To theatrical audiences of the time there was no false note in this; they were used to integrating movie sets into their imaginative processes. … For me the scene in Central Park lost its believability … as the camera moves with Ms Randolph, everything surrounding her screams fake! fake! fake! to my eye. While I was supposed to be worrying about whether or not Jane Randolph was going to be attacked, I found myself worrying instead about that papier-mâché stone wall in the background. When the bus finally pulls up, the chuff of its air-brakes miming the cat’s cheated growl, I was wondering if it was hard getting that New York City bus onto a closed soundstage and if the bushes in the background were real or plastic.40

There is some truth in this, though King omits to state that the option of location filming was unavailable also because Cat People was shot a continent away from its New York setting. A shot of a distinctive Central Park underpass is used as a back projection plate, but otherwise the film remains confined to the RKO lot. It may well be that modern audiences don’t find the New York of Cat People a ‘convincing’ milieu, but even if it had been shot on location, it might not satisfy modern audiences simply because it is in black and white. The cityscapes of film noir, prefigured in Tourneur and Musuraca’s work in this picture, are mostly stagebound but nevertheless convince on a level that flirts with both fantasy and reality. Musuraca had already worked on Boris Ingster’s Stranger on the Third Floor (1940),

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a proto-noir with several stalking sequences that might have influenced Cat People; and several key noirs – notably Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944) – include scenes that echo this stroll in the park. The ‘Lewton walk’41 recurs in almost all his films, with notable amplifications of the Cat People scene in The Leopard Man (where the last ‘bus’ isn’t a false menace) and The Seventh Victim (as Jean Brooks is pursued through New York by diabolists). Alice is on her bus home – answering the driver’s ‘You look as though you’d seen a ghost’ with a trembling ‘Did you see it?’ – but the scene isn’t over. The disturbed trees and bleating sheep suggest action beyond our sight. A keeper with a lantern checks on a flock of sheep (a zoo exhibit?) and we see four dead lumps among the animals. A light seems to shine on paw-prints, and a spot-lit tracking shot shows them turning into high-heeled shoe-marks as we hear Irena’s footsteps again. We catch up with Irena, dabbing her mouth with a hankie, and she pauses in a pool of light. Just as the bus drew up next to Alice, a taxi draws up next to Irena – she doesn’t jump and

Changing footprints

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neither do we, though she does take a cab-ride home.42 The shot of the shape-shifting tracks, an echo of The Wolf Man, is privileged, seen by only the audience. The transformation (fur to shoes) establishes a different category of the supernatural from that of the Universal film, in which Larry Talbot takes off his shoes so his bare feet can become hairy paws. When Irena changes, her clothes become her pelt – a more fairy-tale, magical approach than the physical, earthbound Universal lycanthropy.43 At the YWCA Irena gets home and Oliver tries to make up with her. She wards him off with ‘No, please don’t, don’t touch me’ and he blusters, ‘You’ve got to understand, and you’ve got to forgive me.’ Without looking at him, she says, ‘I forgive you’, and locks herself in the bathroom, where she begins to undress. Oliver is hesitant and concerned outside yet another door. The camera takes note of the claw-foot of the bathtub and pans up to Irena, hunched over, naked and wet, sobbing. This affecting little vignette must have been fairly risqué for 1942: Simone Simon stripping her stockings and exposing a little naked back in a non-sexual situation wouldn’t have counted as ‘hot stuff’ before the imposition of the Production Code in 1934, but here it indicates Lewton’s intention to push the envelope on censorship. He may be remembered as the master of tasteful horror, but in the 1940s he pioneered explicit gore – the blood under the door in The Leopard Man, the knife-slashed belly in The Ghost Ship – and, especially in Cat People and The Seventh Victim, bathroom and bedroom activities. The Body Snatcher was severely censored in Britain and Bedlam banned outright. We cut from bath to bed and Irena has a bad dream, perhaps influenced by the similar ‘symbolic’ nightmares suffered by shapeshifters in The Wolf Man and the 1932 and 1941 versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A swirling spiral gives way to cartoon animated stalking cats (hardly a typical frill for an inexpensive movie) and samples of Dr Judd’s diagnosis, then we see Tom Conway garbed in

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In the bath

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King John’s armour and a shining sword becoming a giant key, the key to the panther cage (this sort of effect is repeated more elaborately by Hitchcock and Selznick in Spellbound, 1945). The next day, Irena steals the real key and makes eye contact with the wary beast. It’s less clear here than it is in the remake, but we are to assume that until now Irena has only been afraid that she is one of the cat people: in the Central Park scene, she transformed and killed, and now she knows what she is. Though her sobbing in the bath suggests guilt, the dream and the theft of the key indicate the growing dominance of her cat personality and the next time she changes, it will be a deliberate act, intended to frighten her rival. Oliver, Alice and Irena are at a museum, and Oliver and Alice are back to being insensitive again – his begging for forgiveness and her terror haven’t lasted long. As they are absorbed in a man o’war exhibit (‘Look, Ollie, a drawing of the Victory’ – another reference to America’s naval power and the seeing-off of foreigners), Oliver suggests Irena go and look at ‘some beautiful moderns upstairs’. She protests, ‘But I like looking at these little boats’ (does Oliver cringe that she doesn’t know the difference between a boat and a ship?), but is brushed off by the happy couple. On the stairs, she pauses and poses by a black Egyptian statue, determining to use her cat powers to get even with Alice. The statue is jackal-headed Anubis, perhaps because the RKO props department didn’t have a cat-headed Bubastis in stock (they did manage, however, to stick a panther-like figurehead on the model warship at the centre of the naval exhibit). Purposefully, Irena leaves the museum. Later, Alice gets home. She lives at the YWCA, and asks the receptionist for the key to the pool, intending to fit a quick swim into her busy life. She takes time to fuss over a kitten, ‘one of four’ the receptionist is looking after, and the animal (which likes Alice) follows her down to the changing rooms. Irena arrives in a cab and slyly asks after Alice, and is directed to the basement pool. Alice notices the kitten is spooked by something, but turns off the changing-room light and goes to the deserted pool. A panther’s growl

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Animated dream; at the museum

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startles her, and she jumps into the water. Shadows swirl around as she treads water, and cat noises terrify her. Like Hitchcock, Lewton and Tourneur understand how to make a screen character seem more vulnerable: Janet Leigh’s shower in Psycho (1960)44 and Tippi Hedren’s telephone box in The Birds serve the same function as Jane Randolph’s swimming pool, at once claustrophobic and isolating. We have a fully orchestrated symphony of shadows, and Alice screams in terror. The receptionist and a maid (Betty Roadman) hurry down to the pool. Irena, calm and poised, turns on the lights and looks at Alice, floundering in the water. ‘It was dark down here and Mrs Reed coming in unexpectedly frightened me,’ Alice claims, only to plead for the staff not to leave her alone with the other woman. Irena says she has come to ask Alice where Oliver might be after having missed them at the museum, and Alice tells her nervously, ‘You’ll probably find him at home.’ Here, the two actresses manage insincerity with ease, each lying right back at the other; but Alice, dripping wet and hair in rat-tails, is now the nervous, edgy, marginalised one and Irena, fresh from being a panther, is the composed, cool, sexually confident creature. After Irena has gone, the receptionist hands Alice her robe, only to notice, ‘Gee, honey, it’s torn to ribbons.’ Tourneur recognised that the swimming pool sequence was a set-piece: It is a scene everyone talks about: there’s a girl, the heroine, in a deserted indoor swimming pool at night, and her enemy, the girl who becomes a cat, a leopard, prowls along the side of the pool howling, and the shadows are on the walls, and there’s a feeling of terror. To get the right feeling of claustrophobia, we purposely selected a pool in an existing apartment building here that was like the inside of a shoebox: white walls and low ceiling, with powerful light reflections from the water. We believed in suggesting horror rather than showing it. The shadow you saw of the big cat on the wall of the swimming pool was actually my fist. We had one big arc-light with a diffuser on it in the pool and we had to shoot the sequence in one morning. We tried the effect

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In the pool

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every possible way to get the right diffused shadow, and then finally I made the shadow myself. … My only complaint about that scene was that the girl threatened in the pool wasn’t feminine or diminutive enough. She was built like a wrestler! Too bad!45

In another interview, echoing Lewton’s comments on the Central Park scene, Tourneur said, ‘To this day, people swear that there was a cat by that swimming pool.’46 It’s never been confirmed, but the most catlike of the shadows around the pool looks suspiciously as if it were animated (perhaps by the artists who handled the dream sequence). The result of the pool scene is that Alice changes her mind about Irena. She calls Dr Judd, who is presumably unable to resist a summons to the YWCA, and – while smoking another cigarette – asks, ‘How much do you believe about the cat people?’ Following his function as the man who rationally explains what we know to be supernatural, Dr Judd blathers, ‘I believe … the story is a product of her fear, her own overworked imagination.’ Alice isn’t buying Freud this week and tells him, ‘I believe Irena’s story … twice, I’ve been followed by something that was not human, something that attempted to take my life. I believe that that was the cat form of Irena.’ Dr Judd asks why Irena would want to harm Alice and she admits, ‘Because I’m in love with her husband.’ This delights Dr Judd: ‘My dear Miss Moore, the story grows more and more charming. … You’re both victims of fear. Mrs Reed fears the past and you fear the present. Mrs Reed has a very strong imagination and you have an equally strong conscience.’ She shows him the shredded robe as proof, but he is more interested in hearing ‘Mrs Reed’s version of the story’, perhaps because Alice’s claim on Oliver suggests to him that Irena might be more open to some tit-for-tat adultery (‘that should be a most interesting interview’). ‘I shouldn’t advise you to see her alone,’ snips Alice and Dr Judd pompously expostulates, ‘You want me to carry some means of protection – a gun, perhaps, with a silver bullet?’ He flashes a length of sword-cane and purrs, ‘Of course, this isn’t silver.’

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‘She never lied to us’ Dr Judd might continue to scorn the supernatural, but he knows enough not to conduct his next session with Irena in the dark. In broad daylight in his bland office, he hears her out once again: ‘You say you have lapses of memory for which you cannot account. They’re becoming more frequent and you’re afraid … I can’t help you. You’re not truthful with me.’ Irena pleads: ‘But I am. I’ve told you everything. I have not lied to you.’ Earlier, she seemed to have conscious knowledge of her transformation in the park; now, she talks about ‘lapses of memory’. The cold, calculating human Irena who bluffed her way into the YWCA and played icy poolside conversation games is as much an alternate personality as her cat form. Dr Judd continues to harry: ‘Do you sincerely believe that if your husband were to kiss you, you would change into a cat and rend him to bits?’ She responds: ‘I don’t know. I’m only afraid.’ He presses ‘This isn’t silver’

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his luck: ‘And if I were to kiss you?’ Like the animals in the pet shop, Irena knows who’s ‘not right’ and replies, ‘I only know that I should not like to be kissed by you.’ Unfazed by the turn-down, Dr Judd launches into another lecture, lacing his diagnosis with threat, brandishing a cigarette: My dear Mrs Reed, sometimes in my profession there comes a contest of wills between the doctor and his patient. Patients are clever … and they can fool the doctor. Sometimes. You’re very clever and perhaps you enjoy this little game you’re having with me … I can’t help you, but I can warn you. These hallucinations approach insanity. This nonsense about Miss Moore, at the park and in the swimming pool. It’s a deterioration of the mind, an escape into fantasy. And it’s dangerous. At this moment, I could go before a board and have you put away for observation. You’re that close to real insanity. I can’t help you. You can only help yourself. You keep going back to the mad legends of your birthplace. Forget them. You surround yourself with cat objects, pictures. Get rid of them. Lead a normal life.

She considers it: ‘You know for the first time, you’ve really helped me.’ He suaves up again: ‘Maybe it’s because you interest me.’ All desperate smiles, Irena prepares a candle-lit dinner for two at the apartment. Oliver returns, dressed in his trenchcoat, looking solemn. ‘Oliver, I went back to Dr Judd’s office,’ she tells him, ready to be kissed. ‘I’m no longer afraid.’ With spectacularly bad timing, Oliver responds: ‘Believe me, Irena, I’d have been the happiest man in the world if you’d told me that a little while ago, but things have changed. I had to learn, maybe through this marriage of ours. I didn’t want to tell you this, but now you see I have to. I love Alice. Irena, it’s too late. … There seems only one decent thing for me to do. I’ll give you a divorce. Believe me, it’s better this way.’ Again, she has an instant insight into a man’s character: ‘Better? Better for whom?’ She slumps onto the sofa, face pressed to the cushions, and murmurs in agony, ‘There’s nothing you can say, there’s only silence … but I love silence, I love loneliness. …’ Her self-pity dwindles into Serbian

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A marriage, ending (note cat brooch); cat scratch fever

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whispers, and Oliver tries to be solicitous. She orders him out of the apartment, and he leaves. As candle-shadows flicker, Irena’s sharpened fingertips casually caress the sofa-cover, leaving scratches in the material. An echo of her pawing at the door on her wedding night, this image is one of the film’s most subtly chilling, suggesting what those same nails might do to a human face. In an impromptu meeting at Sally Lunn’s, Alice (‘Bavarian cream’), Dr Judd (‘Roquefort’) and Oliver (‘and you get the apple pie’) plot against Irena, telling themselves they’re only trying to help. ‘As a psychiatrist, I should recommend you have her put away,’ says Dr Judd. ‘As your friend, however, I have much more reasonable advice to offer. I think you should have your marriage annulled. In that way, you are free of responsibility. You two could marry.’ Alice has obviously looked it up: ‘And if Irena’s sent away?’ Dr Judd elaborates, ‘The law is quite explicit, one cannot divorce an insane person.’ Oliver is trying to be considerate (‘If she’s not well, I’m going to take care of her’) and Alice is supportive (‘It’s the only right thing, Ollie’). Without even bothering to argue further, Dr Judd consents: ‘As you will. I’ll have the commitment papers drawn up, and arrange an interview with Mrs Reed at her apartment tonight.’ But Irena doesn’t show up that evening. Oliver and Dr Judd smoke and Alice listens to Irena’s lullaby record (‘Let’s not play that,’ Oliver snaps, lifting the gramophone arm) as they wait, but give up after an hour and a half. As they all leave, Dr Judd pulls a sneaky trick that confirms our suspicions about him: he deliberately forgets his swordcane, then borrows Oliver’s keys to pop back into the apartment to fetch it, leaving the door on the latch so he can get in later. It seems likely Oliver and Alice sublimate their desire for each other into their work, for they return in mid-evening to their darkened, deserted office and toil over yet more shipping designs (‘We’ve had a terribly broken-up day and there’s lots of work to be done’). Maybe both have been so preoccupied lately that they are falling behind? Alice takes another silent phone call, and jumps to a conclusion: ‘There was someone on the other end of the line. I could

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almost hear them listening. Then there was a little click as they hung up the receiver. That was the night I was followed on the transverse. Ollie, let’s get out of here. I’m afraid. That was Irena. I know it was Irena who called. She could call from downstairs. She may be on her way up now.’ They find they have been locked in and there’s a black panther in the office, slinking in the shadows, growling menace, backing Oliver and Alice into a corner. Oliver, convinced at last, takes down a T-square and brandishes it like a crucifix, praying, ‘Leave us, Irena … in the name of God, leave us in peace.’ The beast, faced down, backs off and disappears. Hurrying out of the office, Oliver and Alice pause in the lobby, where Alice notices ‘Irena’s perfume, strong, sweet’ and declares, ‘I need a drink.’ This is the scene that seems to excite the most criticism: of the warding-off, Joel E. Siegel notes, ‘only once does Lewton fall prey to horror conventions’47 – overlooking the symbolic statue, the psychic animals, the dream sequence, the transforming footprints, etc. – and Tourneur wasn’t keen on including an actual panther: ‘The front office made me put a cat in the drafting room scene: I had only intended to suggest the cat’s presence by shadows. Despite orders to reshoot the scene, I shot it so that you couldn’t really be sure what you were seeing. That’s the only way to do it.’48 For those who want to preserve their ambiguity, at least until the very last scene, there is a possible rational explanation: Irena stole the key to the panther cage, remember – she could have released it and brought it to the office to sic on her husband and his sweetie. It strikes me that the front office might have had a point, just as the producers who wanted Tourneur to feature an actual demon in Night of the Demon (1958) were probably right.49 We have had two major transformation scenes without seeing the creature, and we – and Alice, if not Dr Judd – are satisfied that Irena is a cat werewolf. The prowling, flashing-eyed big cat allows this scene to build on the earlier ones, showing us just a bit more. Even if he was grouchy about being made to use a leopard, Tourneur – again abetted by Musuraca and the art directors – pulls off a

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Dreyer-like silhouette

Warding off Evil

A real panther

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bit of bravura in this scene. With the strong underlighting from the drafting tables shining merciless spotlights on Oliver and Alice as they back into a corner, the scene uses light as inventively as shadow to terrify. The cat inhabits pools of dark low down in the room, prowling between items of furniture, but its potential prey are frozen in harsh, bright whiteness against the walls. The business with the T-square strikes some as unintentionally funny, though it seems that Lewton’s actual intent was again to have it both ways – using the horror movie cliché but justifying it by context (we are in a sketching room and the implement does come easily to hand, like the candlesticks Peter Cushing uses as a crucifix in Terence Fisher’s Dracula, 1958). Even more daring, and even less successful with a hostile audience, is Tom Conway’s recitation of the Lord’s Prayer to cow a roomful of cultists at the equivalent moment of The Seventh Victim. Alice and Oliver get hold of Dr Judd on the telephone, calling him at Irena’s apartment (they have tried his hotel room first). Alice is too concerned to give him a hard time about his sneaking back to wait for Irena, and insists ‘but she is dangerous, Dr Judd, I warn you’. Irena returns, clearly in one of her ‘lapses’, and Dr Judd hangs up on Alice, then tries an approach that goes beyond therapy and comes close to rape. ‘You see I’ve never believed your story,’ he purrs. ‘I’m not afraid of you. I’ll take you in my arms. So little, so soft, warm perfume in your hair, your body. Don’t be afraid of me, Irena. …’ Finally, Irena gets the kiss she’s been afraid of. Dr Judd freezes halfway through – just as Kevin McCarthy will while kissing an alien duplicate Dana Wynter in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) – and draws back to look in terror at her blank, white face. Irena advances, face shadowing, eyes glinting. This optical darkening is as near Cat People comes to a traditional werewolf transformation effect, and it was an afterthought. RKO technician Linwood G. Dunn noted, ‘There was no preparation of any kind for the effect, otherwise it would have been easy. I made her darken by a complicated application of density manipulation and masking.’ 50

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The cat woman attacks Dr Judd. He draws his sword, knocking over a lamp – as Vera Miles will in Psycho – and his struggle is depicted via giant twisting shadows on the wall, helter-skelter music and editing, terrified facial close-ups and a few cuts of a stuntman wrestling the panther. There’s a spectacular leap as the panther bears down on the psychiatrist (presumably a stunt double), and Alice and Oliver arrive, hearing the commotion from the lobby. Irena, human again, slips out of the flat, holding her shoulder, and hides behind a potted jungle shrub, while Alice and Oliver fight their way through the cluster of nosy neighbours (notably, a couple of middle-aged women who live together) who take the killing of Dr Judd as justification for invading Irena’s apartment, just as Catherine Deneuve’s neighbours will swarm into her hellish flat in the last reel of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965).51 Alice notices the doctor’s sword-cane is broken in half. At the zoo, in the fog, Irena opens the panther’s cage and apparently waits to be attacked. The creature cowers away from her, as from a rival, then sideswipes her with his claws as he escapes, vaulting over a wall to run straight under a car. Oliver and Alice find Irena dead, transfixed by a length of sword, and Oliver, examining a huddled black body we never see clearly, concludes, ‘She never lied to us.’ Lewton decided against his planned final shot of the dead Irena as a panther, but couldn’t resist a last stab at culture. The end title is another verse, authentic this time: But black sin hath betrayed to endless night My world, both parts, and both parts must die. (John Donne, Holy Sonnets, V)

The Production Code prohibited plot resolution through suicide, but it is clear that Irena – perhaps fatally wounded by Dr Judd – has used the panther to finish herself off, as is obliquely confirmed by the Donne passage.52

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Cold kiss

Transforming

Shadows on the screen

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Wounded

Transfixed

‘She never lied to us’

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The Curse of the Cat People The trade paper reviews, appearing appropriately enough on Friday, 13 November 1942, were all mildly favourable; there was reason to suppose that Cat People would do all right, but no hint of the tremendous popular response it would receive. The New York newspaper reviews were not particularly encouraging when Cat People opened at the Rialto Theatre, a famous chiller showcase, on 7 December, backed up by a particularly lurid advertising campaign. Reviewers for the Times, Herald Tribune, Sunday News and World Telegram all went thumbs down; the Sun, Sunday Mirror, Journal American and PM were more positive, if not really enthusiastic. The Los Angeles reviews were somewhat better when the film opened on 14 January at the Hawaii Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, supported by a Warner Brothers’ dud called The Gorilla Man. But a number of reviewers from various women’s clubs had very definite feelings about Cat People. ‘Fantastic and unhealthy,’ said the University Women; ‘Weird and unbelievable,’ said the Business and Professional Women; ‘Morbid and unconstructive,’ chimed in the Parent-Teachers Association; and Zeta Phi Eta, a speech arts honorary fraternity, condemned the film as ‘a horrible idea, unethically treated.’ Such reviews were nearly success enough for Lewton, who delighted in them.

Lobby display

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In spite of the mixed reviews, word-of-mouth was very good and audiences flocked to see Cat People wherever it played. The film that theatre bookers had expected would run no longer than a few days was held over week after week. It played so long at the Rialto that a number of newspaper reviewers went back for a second, more favourable look. In Hollywood, Cat People played a record thirteen-week engagement at the Hawaii, where Citizen Kane’s first run lasted only twelve weeks. By the time the film’s general release was completed, it had earned enough money to save RKO which, in deeper financial trouble than ever before, had been forced to pinkslip many of its employees. Although the studio has now been out of existence for nearly seventeen years, the owners of its records, RKO General Tire, will not release any of the financial files, making it impossible to quote an exact figure on how much Cat People grossed. Bodeen says $4,000,000; almost every published estimate exceeds $2,000,000.53

Though often repeated, it is not entirely true that Cat People singlehandedly pulled RKO out of its decline: that same year, Edward Dmytryk directed Hitler’s Children, also with Kent Smith, an inexpensive but topical picture that attracted wide notice and similarly grossed far beyond its modest expectations. Cat People was, however, the foundation if not for a career then a burst of creativity. Lewton and Tourneur were already at work on a follow-up, I Walked with a Zombie, and would do The Leopard Man together, before Tourneur was ‘promoted’ out of the unit. Mark Robson was moved up from the editor’s workshop to make his directorial debut with The Seventh Victim, swiftly followed by The Ghost Ship and the unit’s first non-horror picture, the topical juvenile delinquency movie Youth Runs Wild, the only Lewton movie to make much of the wartime setting. Robert Wise, another editor (he had worked on Kane and Ambersons), took over the direction of The Curse of the Cat People and handled the unit’s first period picture, the Maupassant adaptation Mademoiselle Fifi. Koerner, either Lewton’s patron or exploiter depending upon whom you believe,54 died and was replaced by Jack Gross who, as Robson said, ‘had come to RKO from Universal, where the prevailing idea of horror was a

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werewolf chasing a girl up a tree’.55 Gross signed Boris Karloff to a three-picture deal, a tactic evidently designed to force Lewton to make werewolf-up-a-tree pictures but which yielded three remarkable, gruesome, poetic period-piece horror movies, Robson’s Isle of the Dead and Bedlam and Wise’s The Body Snatcher. Associates and biographers have tended to depict the former Weird Tales contributor as embarrassed by his success in the horror field. However, Lewton himself evidently gave a great deal of thought to how to make better horror films than anyone else. In a 1944 press release, he wrote: The characters in the run-of-the-mill weird films were usually people very remote from the audiences’ experiences. European nobles of dark antecedents, mad scientists, man-created monsters, and the like cavorted across the screen. It would be much more entertaining if people with whom audiences could identify were shown in contact with the strange, the weird and the occult. We made it a basic part of our work to show normal people – engaged in normal occupations – in our pictures.56

When he made period horror pictures, he would still ensure that his characters were engaged in credible professions, even body-snatching and asylum-keeping. This may well be Lewton’s most important legacy to the horror film. Horror-crime hybrids like Michael Curtiz’s New York-set Mystery of the Wax Museum (1932) had mixed mad science with wisecracking reporters, but Cat People was the first major supernatural horror film with a contemporary, urban American setting and ‘normal people, engaged in normal occupations’ as leading characters; as such, it is the progenitor of a whole tradition of bestselling and box-office horror. Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, filmed by Roman Polanski in 1968, takes care to establish its New York settings (it is also concerned with ‘what lies behind a brownstone front’) and the professional and personal lives of its characters before introducing the ambiguously supernatural elements that will wreck its heroine’s

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marriage. The effect, as Lewton foresaw, was to sidestep the audience’s cynicism: the world of the story is established as identical with the world of the audience – to the extent of dropping brandnames and using real-life locations – and the supernatural is thus the more terrifying. Subsequently, Stephen King and others have made this formula the dominant mode of contemporary horror, rendering werewolf-up-a-tree gothics somewhat quaint. Of The Seventh Victim, but with relevance to his entire output, Lewton claimed: This picture’s appeal, like that of its predecessors, is based on three fundamental theories. First is that audiences will people any patch of prepared darkness with more horror, suspense and frightfulness than the most imaginative writer could dream up. Second, and most important, is the fact that extraordinary things can happen to very ordinary people. And third is to use the beauty of the setting and camera work to ward off audience laughter in situations which, when less beautifully photographed, might seem ludicrous.57

Most succinctly, he encapsulated his approach to the Los Angeles Times: ‘Our formula is simple. A love story, three scenes of suggested horror and one of actual violence. Fadeout. It’s all over in less than seventy minutes.’58 It is plain from quotes like this that Lewton was capable of delighting in the reputation his films had brought him, and was proud of their considerable achievements. Those who praise Lewton’s ‘subtlety’ and ‘good taste’ are only half-right: his films are more physically violent than the competition and, though they rarely use monster make-ups, are more determined in their mission to frighten an audience. The pressure on Lewton to repeat the success of Cat People was evident in his subsequent productions. It seems likely that he would in any case have tended to build up a repertory company to appear in his films, as Universal had done with their monster movies, and the efficiency of RKO was dependent on retaining expert technicians like Musuraca, D’Agostino and Webb, who would stay with the unit.

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But for the success of Cat People, however, the later Lewton films might have been very different, if they were made at all. As early as Lewton’s third film, The Leopard Man, there was an attempt to recapture the ingredients of Cat People, with a killer leopard on the loose in New Mexico being exploited by a homicidal maniac who feels a kinship with the beast. The Seventh Victim – in many ways strangest of the Lewton output – is set in the New York of Cat People, and also features a romantic triangle between ‘normal’ lawyer Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont, making Kent Smith seem charismatic) and two women (sisters, this time), the conventional but calculating Mary (Kim Hunter) and the haunted, fascinating, doomed Jacqueline (Jean Brooks). Searching for her missing sister, who has become mixed up with a gang of decorous Devil-worshippers called the Palladists, Mary discovers that Jacqueline’s psychiatrist was our old friend, Dr Louis Judd (Tom Conway, reprising his role). Though Conway’s Judd seems to be the same character – in his introductory scene, he brushes aside a receptionist’s gentle plea for help on behalf of a drunken relative with ‘dipsomania is rather sordid’ – and is as lecherously intent on possessing Jacqueline as he was Irena, it is hard to fit Cat People and The Seventh Victim together as original and sequel. Jason Hoag (Erford Gage), a poet, refers to his love for a woman who was once a patient of the psychiatrist in terms (‘there was another girl, years ago’) that immediately suggest he is talking about Irena, but Judd later breaks to him the news that ‘the girl you loved, that other patient of mine, she didn’t disappear. She’s in an asylum. A horrible, raving thing.’ Unless we have misunderstood the finale of Cat People, and neither Irena nor Dr Judd are as dead as they seem,59 then The Seventh Victim can’t be a continuation of their story. It would be tempting to assume that the later film takes place before the earlier, but Dr Judd seems to undergo a character change of the sort that might be conceivable if he had survived Irena’s attack and had his entire belief system shaken. Though initially posing as a cynic and a lecher, this Judd sincerely tries to help Jacqueline, has a genuine (if odd) friendship/ rivalry with the poet and even gets to take a moral stand against the

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Palladists, citing the worth of the Lord’s Prayer ‘as a rule for human relationships’. Given that Judd is distantly derived from Blackwood’s ‘physician extraordinary’ John Silence and that Tom Conway was the star of RKO’s Falcon films, one wonders whether there was ever an intention that the Lewton unit should turn out a series of detective-horror pictures with the ghost-busting sleuth facing a series of menaces. For an idea of what these might have been like, look at William Clemens’s gloomy but fun The Falcon and the Co-Eds (1943), scripted by Lewton collaborator Ardel Wray, with several of the cast of The Seventh Victim taking part in a mystery set in a Lewtonesque cliff-top girls’ school. Further muddying the waters is a more ostensible sequel, The Curse of the Cat People. The returning survivors of Cat People this time are Oliver and Alice, still played by Kent Smith and Jane Randolph, now happily married and moved to the country (Tarrytown) with their six-year-old daughter Amy (Ann Carter). The dialogue confirms our impression of the end of the first film (‘She killed a man and then she killed herself’), relegating The Seventh Victim to a sidestream of time, but this is the movie which Lewton really did sneak past his masters. When they requested a sequel to Cat People, RKO can hardly have expected Lewton and Bodeen to reuse the characters of the first film but tell a completely different story, about an imaginative and misunderstood child who has an imaginary friendship with Irena (Simone Simon, dressed like a fairy-tale princess), who is either a gentle ghost or a figment of the imagination. Evidence is presented to support both readings, as Irena doesn’t have a face until Amy has discovered a photograph of her father’s first wife,60 but the apparition seems to have an independent personality and emotions, finally sacrificing her own existence so that Amy can forge a real relationship with Oliver. Oliver complains that he feels the family is under a curse, justifying the title, and Roy Webb’s ominous and charming Irena themes haunt the soundtrack, but there are no cat transformations and Irena, judging by the Christmas carol she sings, has lost her Serbian ethnicity in the afterlife and become French.

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Nevertheless, the film is as much a psychological horror film as it is a study of an imaginative child, as Amy makes friends with Mrs Farren (Julia Dean), a former stage star who lives in an old dark house with the daughter (Elizabeth Russell) she refuses to acknowledge. Just as we see the insensitivity of Oliver Reed, no better as a father than he was as a husband, crushing his daughter’s spirit, so we see Barbara Farren transform from a tragic to a malevolent figure, who is in the climax on the point of strangling Amy when the child’s innocence overwhelms her.61 Many critics lamented that the catchpenny title illserved such a fine film, but The Curse of the Cat People is a more honestly frightening film than, say, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). It is an unusual sequel, but no more than Cat People was an unusual horror film: most follow-ups deliver the same again, as if no one had learned anything from the first film, but this picks up the characters some years on62 and tells a different story that grows out of the first, showing how their experiences have changed them or how different situations bring out the same responses. The Curse of the Cat People (1944): Simone Simon in the garden

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If there were filmgoers in the 1940s who wanted ‘Cat People again, only different’, then there were more than enough studios willing to oblige. The film’s immediate success meant that its innovations almost instantly entered the horror film’s gene pool. Columbia mounted Henry Levin’s Cry of the Werewolf (1943), which cross-breeds the subtle Lewton approach (a dog in shadows) with Universal’s werewolf-up-atree feel (gypsy curses), and lowly PRC turned out Frank Wisbar’s Devil Bat’s Daughter (1946), in which Rosemary LaPlanche is terrified that she has inherited a vampire curse from her father. Universal answered the Cat Woman with the Gorilla Girl in a three-film series: Reginald LeBorg’s Jungle Woman (1944), first sequel to Edward Dmytryk’s schlocky mad scientist movie Captive Wild Woman, even apes the Lewton approach by having the comically inept Acquanetta terrified that she is reverting to gorilla-hood but withholding an actual transformation until the finale. Other contemporary attempts, in one way or another, to imitate the formula were Will Jason’s The Soul of a Monster (1944), Walter Colmes’s The Woman Who Came Back (1945), Jean Yarbrough’s She-Wolf of London (1946), Lesley Selander’s The Catman of Paris (1946),63 Erle C. Kenton’s The Cat Creeps (1946), Yarbrough’s The Creeper (1948), Francis D. Lyon’s Cult of the Cobra (1955), Edgar G. Ulmer’s Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957) and Edward L. Cahn’s The She Creature (1957). Most of these films adopt the Lewton–Bodeen plot nugget (heroine is afraid she has inherited a tendency to turn into a monster) and try to imitate the Tourneur–Musuraca shadowy horror noir style but still feel obliged to toss in fur-face effects and use a gothic old dark house setting with out-of-stock melodrama characters. If Alfred Shaughnessy’s British Cat Girl (1957), with Barbara Shelley succumbing to the family curse, is the last of the Cat People rip-offs, then Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide (1963) is the first of the homages. With Linda Lawson as a sideshow mermaid who fears she is a siren and Dennis Hopper as a sailor fascinated by her, this is an explicit reworking of the plot of the Lewton film – including encounters with an Elizabeth Russell-like rival siren – but has a saltweathered, seaside feel more akin to I Walked with a Zombie or The

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Ghost Ship and enough distinctive aspects not to feel like a footnote, including an even sharper distinction between oneiric suggestiveness and rational explanation. Harrington’s The Cat Creature (1973) is a lesser effort, more indebted to Universal with its mummy-vampirewerecat monster. British producer Milton Subotsky bought remake rights from RKO and developed the project for several years, eventually passing the property to Universal (ironically), who hired Paul Schrader to direct Alan Ormsby’s script in 1982. Schrader’s film, with Nastassja Kinski as Irena Gallier and Malcolm McDowell as her mad preacher brother Paul, is very different in style from the original, though it recreates many of its highlights, and frankly something of a mess. It does, however, come up with a workable solution to its triangle as Irena chooses to remain a panther, so zookeepers Oliver (John Heard) and Alice (Annette O’Toole) can care for her. Valerie Martin’s New Orleans-set novel The Great Divorce (1994) is, among many other things, a revision of Schrader’s interpretation of the original film. Also worthy of mention in the growing Cat People filmography is John Leslie’s porno movie The Cat Woman (1988), The Schrader remake (1982): Nastassja Kinski as Irena Gallier

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with Kathleen Gentry, in which acceptance of the heroine’s animal side is a species of liberation; Leslie showed a certain reverence for his sources when he entitled his sequel, starring Racquel Darrian, The Curse of the Cat Woman (1991). Almost as extreme variants on the theme are Mick Garris’s Sleepwalkers (1991), scripted by Stephen King, with Alice Krige as a cat matriarch and Brian Krause as her conflicted son, and Paul Lynch’s Tomcat: Dangerous Desire (1993), with Richard Grieco as a long-haired dancer dosed with feline DNA and recipient of the proportionate strength (and the morals) of a tomcat. Mike Nichols’s Wolf (1994) is a combined update of Werewolf of London and Cat People, with Jack Nicholson’s lycanthropic publisher rampaging through Irena’s old Central Park hunting ground. There has been some back-and-forth auteurism, debating whether the film’s strengths should be ascribed to Lewton or Tourneur. In Night of the Demon, Tourneur effectively managed a Lewtonesque film without Lewton, and there are elements of his direction, especially in the lighting, that would not be carried over into Lewton’s non-Tourneur films. However, the starkness of Mark The Catman of Paris (1946): an ‘ordinary’ cat werewolf film

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Robson’s Lewton films is different in quality from Tourneur’s, at once more spiritual and more physically violent. Tourneur’s films are never ugly, even at their most menacing; he wouldn’t have made The Seventh Victim as powerful a picture; with Tourneur’s lighting, even the final scene, which Robson shoots with matter-of-fact brutality, would be beautiful. Unlike Tourneur, Robson would become a major Hollywood director but never again make anything on a level with his Lewton work. Robert Wise, too, in a long and varied career, would return to the Lewton style once, in the large-scale ghost story The Haunting (1963), which just tips towards being a psychological study rather than a gothic tale, a move Tourneur would never have made. Tourneur always seemed to be in two minds about Cat People; he once said ‘Cat People ... was very childish but audiences in those days were much more naive than they are today. If you made Cat People today exactly as we did, they’d laugh you out of the theatre because it was naive – a kind of joke. But there were some very good things in it.’64 On another occasion, he mused: The picture was made during the war, and during war, for some mysterious reason, people love to be frightened. Subconsciously we all enjoy being afraid, and in war that feeling is intensified. Wars release all our needs: young men can rape with sanction, plunder without retribution. We all love wars and love to be frightened, and in wartime people had money from the plants, money to burn, and they loved that kind of film.65

Unlike Robson and Wise, he never quite became an establishment director: even career highlights like Out of the Past (1947) and Night of the Demon were not major successes, and he found himself stuck with too many oddball projects like the Italian muscleman movie Giant of Marathon (1960) or the childish Vincent Price vehicle War Gods of the Deep (1965). However, Tourneur created a body of work after leaving the Lewton unit; when he left RKO, Lewton himself managed only three more films, two disasters (My Own True Love, 1948; Please Believe Me, 1950) and a solid little Western (Hugo Fregonese’s Apache

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Drums, 1951) before his premature death aged forty-six in 1951. Lewton’s films were recognised on their first release by perceptive critics like James Agee and Manny Farber as extraordinary by any standards, and are treated sympathetically by the first critical histories of the horror film.66 There has even been a modest backlash on the part of werewolf-up-a-tree lovers: Ken Hanke gripes, ‘It isn’t that the films are unsuccessful in themselves. It’s simply that they threw out the baby with the bathwater by rejecting everything of the Universal product. Moreover, the films are a bit too trés snob and condescending for genre fans to feel comfortable about them.’67 Cat People itself, foundation of the Lewton style, has taken knocks even from sympathetic critics: Joel E. Siegel notes, ‘Cat People, Lewton’s greatest popular success, is not among his best films; it is seriously weakened by passages of lumpy, strained dialogue, uncertain performances and uneven pacing’;68 Edmund Bansak concurs, ‘Cat People has its share of flaws. Its ending is rushed and contrived, and a few scenes are difficult to swallow. The numerous meetings with Dr Judd in the last half hour tax the viewer’s patience, especially when it should appear plain to any sensible human being that aside from being a probable quack, Judd is both a nuisance and a nemesis.’69 Both major Lewton books have mixed feelings about Simone Simon too, though I find her performance remarkably affecting, strange accent and all. Sometimes, her odd line readings make scenes work, and there’s a sense of life in her performance that makes Cat People, like most great monster movies, as much a tragedy as a melodrama. One of the things I find satisfying about The Curse of the Cat People is that it allows some closure for Irena, whether beyond the grave or reincarnated in Amy, that the character has deserved. The repeated viewings – in whole, and part – necessary to write this book have not worn out the film’s mysteries for me: each viewing has revealed some new aspect, some unnoticed detail carefully crafted, some resonance perhaps unintended. I would happily watch it again this evening, which may well be the highest praise I can give any film.

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Afterword: The Curse of the Cat People

In a rare, if apparently accidental, instance of cross-promotion, the first edition of this book was published by the BFI simultaneously with their theatrical re-release of a double bill of Cat People and its sequel, Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise’s The Curse of the Cat People (1944). This article, originally published in a slightly different form in Sight & Sound, is intended as a sequel to the book you’ve just read. While thinking about this pendant, I overheard a critic – I would, ten years on, name names but this one evades my memory – express enthusiasm for the less-known Curse, swiftly qualified with ‘it’s a shame about the title because, of course, it isn’t a sequel and it isn’t a horror film’. It’s easy to see what our friend, presumably no devotee of the Mummy movies Universal were cranking out as Lewton’s RKO unit was making the Cat People films, means. By the 1940s, any remotely successful horror film could be a franchise (cf. Devil Bat’s Daughter), reducing the gothic-romantic genre of the 30s to an assembly line for childish shudder pulps whose doggily lovable monster protagonists were often played by Lon Chaney Jr (himself a ‘son of’). Despite a few lines of dialogue about the ‘curse’ on the Reed family, Curse doesn’t seem to deliver what might have been expected from a sequel. Then again, Cat People doesn’t deliver what might have been expected from a distaff variation on The Wolf Man. Lewton’s specific, stated approach was not to get round his bosses’ demands that he make certain types of films but to make them better, and with more imagination (a key, ambiguous element of the Curse script), than anyone else. Seen on a double bill with Cat People, it becomes obvious that The Curse of the Cat People is a sequel and it is a horror film. The secret of its greatness is that it

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is a very unusual sequel and an extremely left-field horror film. Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) contains an à clef account of the making of Cat People. Ambitious producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) is assigned to make The Doom of the Cat Men and opts to employ shadows rather than monster costumes to terrify the audience, but is disgusted after the successful premiere when he is ‘rewarded’ with his next assignment, The Son of the Cat Man. Most accounts of Lewton’s career suggest this is how he reacted when he was asked to follow up his great success with a film called The Curse of the Cat People. However, even without front-office prompting, he seems to have been willing to repeat and elaborate upon himself. His third film, Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man, is already a reworking of elements from Cat People, and the masterly The Seventh Victim, directed by Mark Robson, is an unacknowledged spin-off, with Tom Conway returning as Dr Judd and another haunted woman (Jean Brooks) rushing to embrace death. Sequels are made for many reasons, not all commercial: The Seventh Victim is a return to the world of Cat People, and provides an alternate life for one of the earlier film’s main characters. Its plot is irreconcilable with Curse, and yet the themes of all three films interweave. By the time he told Lewton to make a Cat People sequel, RKO production chief Charles Koerner must have known better than to expect him to take one of the obvious routes: to bring Irena back from the dead as in the sequels to Universal’s ‘gorilla people’ quickie Captive Wild Woman (1943) or discover a hitherto unacknowledged descendant of the Dubrovna as in Dracula’s Daughter (1935). Given the care taken to establish the invented mythology, Elizabeth Russell’s metropolitan cat lady could easily have become the focus of an interesting, contrasting follow-up to the first film. If those approaches did not appeal, there was always the bare-faced cheek of Monogram’s Return of the Ape Man (1944), which is not a sequel to the Bela Lugosi vehicle The Ape Man (1943) but justifies its title by being about an ape man who returns. The literature on Lewton

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suggests that he opted instead to make a fresh film about child psychology made an unsuccessful attempt to get it retitled Amy and Her Friend, but co-director Robert Wise admits that a paramount concern was that the film contain enough thrills to be promopted as ‘at least a semi-horror film’. Actually, Curse, scripted by DeWitt Bodeen (who had written Cat People), subtly uses both standard sequel approaches – Irena does return from beyond the grave, and the central character is almost Cat Woman’s Daughter. In an era before video when audience memories were expected to fade a little between individual series films, Curse goes out of its way to pick up the threads. Kent Smith and Jane Randolph return as Oliver and Alice, now married and with a daughter, Amy (Ann Carter), and Simon also shows up again, as a transformed Irena who is perhaps an angelic ghost and perhaps Amy’s imaginary friend but who nevertheless haunts all the major characters in an ambiguous manner. Roy Webb’s score reuses motifs established in the first film, including a lullaby associated with Irena that is vital to the plot. A Goya portrait of a child with cats that decorated Irena’s apartment in Cat People has been put up in the Reeds’ new home (‘It doesn’t fit, does it?’ says Alice, significantly, ‘but it’s part of our lives too’). Uniquely, Curse shows us a couple whose lives have credibly evolved since the first film – the Reeds have moved from New York to Tarrytown, and Oliver has advanced from draughtsman to apparently self-employed naval designer who relaxes by making model ships. These characters have been shaped by the events we have seen them live through. Oliver has retreated from an enforced belief in the supernatural and can now tell himself his dead first wife was mentally ill rather than a werepanther. Alice, subtly played by the underrated Randolph, has clearly learned more from the Irena experience, and become more sensitive, though her tenaciousness and conservatism are still evident. The only fudged linkage between the films is the typical one of time: in the two years since Cat People, Oliver and Irena have married and have a six-year-old daughter – if Cat People, which

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doesn’t mention the war, is set in 1940–1, then Curse must take place in what was then a post-war future of 1946 or 47. This is a lot easier to swallow than the twenty-year gaps between each of the four Mummy movies made between 1941 and 44, which should take the plot well into the twenty-first century. The Mummy’s Curse, released eight months after The Mummy’s Ghost, even sneaks in a locale switch: the mummy drowns in a swamp in Massachusetts(!) at the end of one film and is revived in a Louisiana bayou at the beginning of the next. Beside this, it is almost reasonable that between the Cat People films, Irena’s ethnicity switches almost subliminally (she sings in French and the name ‘Dubrovna’ is never mentioned) to align with that of Simone Simon. Like Universal, which began to intertwine its monster series with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Lewton liked to bring back actors from film to film. He stretches the point in Curse by casting the striking Elizabeth Russell, the other Cat Person, as a new character, the neurotic and tormented Barbara Farren. Since the other returnees are in the same roles, this causes a slight confusion (Russell is in The Seventh Victim too, as yet another glamorous, desperate, doomed woman), though nothing like the way Dwight Frye or Lionel Atwill would show up as fresh grave-robber or police inspector characters in each Universal Frankenstein film. The counter-reading of Curse is that it isn’t ‘really’ a horror film but a sensitive study of a lonely child who takes refuge in a fantasy relationship with an imaginary friend (who takes form as a fairy princess Simone Simon). The fact is that the film manages to be both, and those who insist that it should be one ‘respectable’ thing (a psychological study) rather than something as odious as a ghost or horror story are missing a whole series of points – that all great horror or ghost stories have emotional resonances beyond chain-clanking, and that the old dark house gothicisms and the magical fantasy garden of Curse are a literal representation of Amy’s world. The film takes care to fulfil the horror side of its remit not only with gothic atmosphere and suspense sequences that have a

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far greater chill factor than anything going on at Universal but by deliberately evoking key works of horror literature. Most obviously, by setting the story near Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, and having Amy be terrified by a recital of the legend of the Headless Horseman, Lewton taps into the first great spook story in American letters. There are also elements of Henry James’s Turn of the Screw in Amy’s relationship with the ghost of a parent figure violently disapproved of by her living father. Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, an adaption of James’s short novel, draws one incident not from the book but from the Lewton film: Quint and Miss Jessell are not given faces until Deborah Kerr finds a photograph of them (providing, as in Curse, an alternative, ‘psychological’ reading of the plot). Toss in a snippet of R. L. Stevenson’s ‘The Unseen Playmate’ – which pulls off the trick of presenting the magical world of childhood with enough sinister edge to undercut the sentimentality of the surface text – and you have almost a themed anthology, A Child’s Garden of Horrors. A great deal of the film is concerned with the sensitive Amy’s troubles with other children and her family, and Lewton allegedly worked autobiographical elements – like the party invites a child posts in ‘a magic mailbox’ in a hollow tree, resulting in an unattended birthday bash and her ostracism among the children who didn’t get their invitations – into the script. Lewton is perhaps unique in the American cinema, a producer-as-auteur whose influence over his films is seen to be always beneficial. When Lewton’s old boss David O. Selznick replaced directors in mid-shoot and imposed his own personal obsessions on a script, the results were almost always a curate’s egg (Duel in the Sun, 1946) and sometimes seriously malformed a potentially interesting project (The Wild Heart, 1950 – Selznick’s ‘approved’ version of Gone to Earth). Lewton, however, was that rare thing: a visionary team player. If made today, Curse would probably be an Allan Smithee film – original director Gunther von Fritsch was dismissed not for the low quality of his work but because he was shooting too slowly, and

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Robert Wise was promoted from editor and seamlessly took over. Von Fritsch didn’t have a career, but Wise went on to be a major figure (though, like Mark Robson, he never again made anything quite as good as his Lewton films). Lewton’s eleven RKO films were made by three directors, written by a small group of scenarists (all of whom were extensively revised by Lewton who, like Hitchcock, was invisibly a great screenwriter), and drew on the same pool of technicians and contract players. The ‘Lewton’ personality comes from all these people. In terms of carrying over from Cat People, we see that Oliver is as cloddish and ineffectual, though well intentioned, a father as he was as a husband, which is complicated by lingering feelings for his first wife that are passed on to his daughter (‘She could almost be Irena’s child,’ he muses). Alice, who seems to have learned most from the first film but doesn’t feel the need to talk about it, is as might reasonably be expected more effectively sympathetic towards her daughter than she was to Irena. But these are still the limited, ‘plain Americanos’ they always were: Alice quivers downstairs on Twelfth Night, at once upset and almost proud that Amy is receiving her first corporal punishment from Oliver (‘A first spanking,’ says her schoolteacher friend, ‘it’s an important occasion’). It is this chastisement that drives Amy out into the snows for a brush with imaginary terrors (the hoofbeats of the Headless Horseman turn out to be the clanking snowchains of a passing car, a classic Lewton ‘bus’) and the real possibility of death at the Farren House. The horrors are located within the Farren House, a neighbourhood ‘bad place’ with precedents in literature back to the House of Usher and descendants in the likes of Hill House in director Wise’s version of The Haunting and the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Those who don’t consider Curse a horror film must shut their eyes during these scenes, which display a fine grasp of genre set decoration (Albert S. D’Agostino) and lighting camerawork (Nicholas Musuraca) and are unmistakably an

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inspiration for the look and emotional pressure cooker of the Bates House in Psycho. Amy is invited in by Mrs Farren (Julia Dean), once a great actress, who terrifies but enchants her with her dramatic recitals and tales of long-ago glamour. Mrs Farren’s graciousness with this strange child only emphasises what a monster she really is, refusing to acknowledge that her daughter is anything but ‘just the woman who looks after me’ and claiming that her Barbara died when she was about Amy’s age. In the cruel scenes between these women is the nugget of a whole subgenre of American gothic horror that would emerge in the 1960s, in the wake of Psycho and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), in which ageing women trapped in decaying houses exact pointless and drawn-out revenges for imagined slights and, typically, matters are resolved with a death on the stairs. The finale is truly extraordinary, opting for a way out of the horror few subsequent films have taken – though the scene is weirdly almost a blueprint for John Wayne’s refusal to kill Natalie Wood at the end of The Searchers. Mrs Farren dies (on the stairs) of a heart attack while trying to get Amy to hide from Barbara, prompting the jealous woman (‘even my mother’s last moments you’ve stolen from me’) to approach the child with strangler’s hands. Seeing Irena’s soft phantom overlain on the hawk-faced Barbara, which evokes the twinning of Russell and Simon in Cat People, Amy appeals ‘my friend, my friend’ and Barbara embraces rather than throttles the girl. The well-lit, modern but folksy Reed home is in contrast with the gothic Farren house, with its stuffed cats and inky shadows, but we have seen that the ill-faith that infests the place, which has driven Amy to love a ghost or a conjuring of her own mind, could easily spiral out of control and fester into the monstrous, soul-stifling situation of the haunted house round the corner. If Amy had found a ‘real friend’, might she not have become one of the girls in Heavenly Creatures (1994)? Peter Jackson’s film is just one of a string of movies, in and out of genre, that build on the achievements of Curse, exploring the

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wonders and terrors of childhood: The Magnet (1951), Night of the Hunter (1955), The Nanny (1964), Our Mother’s House (1967), The Shining (1980), Paperhouse (1988), El laberinto del fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). At the fade-out, just as the last line of Cat People confirms that Irena was a real Cat Person, Oliver claims to see his daughter’s imaginary friend. He doesn’t really mean it, but is trying to forge a connection with the girl – and incidentally, reversing the horrific climax of The Turn of the Screw in which an adult forces a child to admit they see a ghost. The implication is that Amy doesn’t need Irena any more, in line with the last chapter of The House at Pooh Corner and the song ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ (both cordially distressing to their child audiences). Father and daughter go indoors and Irena fades away. This is another privileged shot; as she vanishes, Irena is alone in the garden, which confirms to us that she really was there all the time.

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Notes 1 Denis Gifford, A Pictorial History of Horror Movies (London: Hamlyn, 1973), pp. 157–63. Gifford discusses Lewton’s films in a chapter entitled ‘The Curse of the “B” People’, lumping them in with the efforts of Columbia, Monogram, PRC, Republic and Universal’s B units. 2 Subsequent to Cat People (1942), the Lewton unit produced Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and The Leopard Man (1943), Mark Robson’s The Seventh Victim (1943), The Ghost Ship (1943), Youth Runs Wild (1944), Isle of the Dead (1945) and Bedlam (1946) and Robert Wise’s The Curse of the Cat People (1944, co-directed with Gunther von Fritsch), Mademoiselle Fifi (1944) and The Body Snatcher (1945). 3 Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, The Celluloid Muse: Hollywood Directors Speak (London: Angus and Robertson, 1969), pp. 217–18. 4 Joel E. Siegel, ‘Tourneur Remembers’, Cinefantastique, vol. 2 no. 4, Summer 1973, p. 24. 5 DeWitt Bodeen, Films in Review, quoted in Joel E. Siegel, Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972), pp. 26–7. Siegel’s is still the best book on Lewton. Other literary properties Lewton considered for Cat People were, apparently, Ambrose Bierce’s ‘The Eyes of the Panther’ (In the Midst of Life, 1892) and Margaret Irwin’s ‘Monsieur Seeks a Wife’ (Madame Fears the Dark, 1935). He had himself published a folkloric cat/werewolf story ‘The Bagheeta’ (Weird Tales, 1930), about a Ukrainian panther woman. 6 Algernon Blackwood, John Silence, Physician Extraordinary (1908).

7 Siegel, ‘Tourneur Remembers’, p. 24. 8 Stephen Jones, The Illustrated Vampire Movie Guide (London: Titan, 1993). Arguably, only Dracula (1931) and Dracula’s Daughter (1936) are proper vampire movies, since the other three films are a foreign-language footnote (Dracula, 1931, Spanish version), a bogus vampire murder mystery (Mark of the Vampire, 1935) and a very obscure B which can’t decide whether its monster is a vampire or a werewolf (Condemned to Live, 1935). 9 Stephen Jones, The Illustrated Werewolf Movie Guide (London: Titan, 1996): Werewolf of London (1935), The Wolf Man (1941), The Undying Monster (1942). John Brahm’s The Undying Monster, which must have been in production as Cat People was being prepared, was 20th Century-Fox’s attempt to get in on the Wolf Man market, though its plot owes more to The Hound of the Baskervilles – which Fox had done in 1939 – and the werewolf only appears in the finale, in which it is revealed that John Howard has been suffering from an Irena-like family curse. 10 George Turner, ‘A Retrospective of the “Original” Val Lewton’s Cat People’, Cinefantastique, vol. 12 no. 4, May–June 1982, p. 25. This is the best piece on the behind-the-scenes making of Cat People. 11 Carlos Clarens, Horror Movies: An Illustrated Survey (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968), p. 163: Taken in their original context – the Hollywood of the early forties – the movies of Val Lewton stand out as chamber music against the seedy bombast of the clawand-fang epics of the day. Brief, precisely constructed, and neatly executed they

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continue to generate an effective secret music of their own. Lewton, swimming against the current, could not hope to turn the tide; he was a modest, lone virtuoso in a period which thrived on marching songs, maudlin themes, and the worn-out misteriosi of a genre already too tired to pick up its coffin and go.

12 A similar relationship exists between the TV series Star Trek and Babylon 5, with the latter at once imitating and criticising the former, almost defining itself as the Anti-Star Trek. 13 Turner, ‘A Retrospective’, p. 24. 14 Siegel, ‘Tourneur Remembers’, p. 24. 15 J. P. Telotte, Dreams of Darkness: Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), p. 197. 16 Edmund G. Bansak, Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1995), p. 129. 17 Siegel, ‘Tourneur Remembers’, p. 24. 18 John Brosnan, The Horror People (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1976), p. 77. 19 Quoted in Siegel, Val Lewton, p. 23. 20 One wonders if it is the same animal that featured so heavily in the 1938 RKO release Bringing Up Baby. That also has a stuffy hero lured away from a dull girlfriend by a wild woman who is associated with a black leopard (which has a blacker doppelgänger). The animal trainer of Cat People was Mel Koontz, while the leopard of Bringing Up Baby was Nessa. 21 Hollow trees were a Lewton motif. In The Curse of the Cat People, little Amy believes – as apparently did the young Lewton – that one in her garden is a magic mailbox.

22 Manny Farber, ‘Val Lewton: Unorthodox Artistry at RKO’, in Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn’s Kings of the Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975), p. 106. 23 When is Cat People set? The fashions are contemporary with the production and the action covers autumn through winter, but Pearl Harbour doesn’t intervene, so I’d guess we’re in 1940–1 rather than 1941–2. Irena’s intended refugee status didn’t make it to the script, so there is no explicit reference to the Second World War. 24 The name is echoed by Jones the Cat, of Alien (1979). 25 The naval theme continues in The Curse of the Cat People, where Oliver builds miniature ships and designs big ones. 26 Turner, ‘A Retrospective’, p. 24. 27 S. S. Prawer, Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 36–7. 28 Inevitably, Oliver has changed his mind about fairy-tales by The Curse of the Cat People. 29 Quoted in Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p.101. Russell posed for the portrait of the lesbian ghost in The Uninvited (1944). 30 The scene is so much a part of the memory of the film that Schrader includes it in his remake, though the entire plot of that version depends on Malcolm McDowell and Nastassja Kinski being the last of the Cat People and thus able to mate only with each

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other. If there’s another Cat Woman in the same city, let alone the world, then McDowell has no problem. 31 ‘“Cat People is about sex” I’ve written in bold capital letters at the top of the page, halfway through my notes on the film. ... Sex, and sexuality, is placed too clearly at the heart of the picture that it’s hardly even a subtext’ (Jeremy Dyson, Bright Darkness: The Lost Art of the Supernatural Horror Film [London: Cassell, 1997], p. 105). 32 At RKO, Conway took over from Sanders in the Falcon series, introduced in The Falcon’s Brother (1942), in which the original hero is killed off so his brother can carry on. 33 Dyson refers to the office stalking scene as ‘Tourneur and Lewton’s one big mistake because the cat is clearly seen and there’s no ambiguity about its nature’ (Bright Darkness, p. 119). 34 Turner, ‘A Retrospective’, p. 24. 35 Interview in the Los Angeles Times, quoted in Siegel, Val Lewton, p. 31. 36 When I first saw Cat People, at a university screening in 1978, the audience did indeed still jump at the ‘bus’. 37 Higham and Greenberg, The Celluloid Muse, p. 209. 38 Interview in the Los Angeles Times, quoted in Siegel, Val Lewton, p. 32. 39 The Bad and the Beautiful is a collation of Hollywood producer anecdotes, many of them about Lewton’s former boss David Selznick. There are significant differences between the makers of The Doom of the Cat Men and Cat People. After his success, Shields is disgusted that the studio assigns him to make The Son

of the Cat Man and instead works with director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan) on an adaptation of ‘a great book’, The Faraway Mountain. When their treatment persuades the studio to make the picture, Shields dumps Amiel (who ‘isn’t ready to direct a million-dollar picture’) and goes with an established director. Actually, Lewton stayed with small budgets while Tourneur, after two more Lewtons, was assigned to a ‘prestige’ production, Days of Glory (1944). Nobody would swap The Curse of the Cat People for Days of Glory (a pompous war movie, introducing Gregory Peck) or most Selznick productions, and I’d far rather see The Son of the Cat Man than The Faraway Mountain. 40 Stephen King, Danse Macabre (London: Macdonald, 1981), p. 118. 41 Bansak, Fearing the Dark, passim. 42 Shots of the caged panther and a leopard are cut into the scene with the sheep, and their terrified bleating seems to affect the big cats, establishing they are at the same location – which means Irena takes a very short cab-ride, since her apartment is within earshot of the zoo. It is also strange that Oliver lets Alice walk to the bus alone since her stop seems to be very close to his building. 43 In House of Dracula (1945), it is revealed that Talbot’s ‘curse’ has a scientific explanation, and he is cured. James Blish’s novella ‘There Shall Be No Darkness’ (1950), filmed as The Beast Must Die (1974), has a pseudoscientific explanation for lycanthropy that includes the transformation of the werewolf’s clothes into his pelt.

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44 In The Seventh Victim, Kim Hunter is menaced in the shower by a sinister woman who appears only in silhouette. 45 Higham and Greenberg, The Celluloid Muse, p. 218. In this interview (p. 218), Tourneur also claims: Now, I had a friend in the San Fernando Valley who had a swimming-pool and kept two pet cheetahs. On hot days when he was working, I’d go there in the afternoon all alone. I’d dive in and swim around. And one day I’ll be damned if one of the cheetahs wasn’t out of his cage and starting to prowl around and growl in a low way, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, here I am feeling naked, I can’t scream,’ and I was going round in circles in the nude, just as the girl did. Luckily, the cheetah was afraid of the water. And eventually, from way back on the property somewhere, the

it on screen in the first scene and tasteful director Tourneur wishing to save it for the climax. 50 Turner, ‘A Retrospective’, p. 26. 51 Deneuve’s sexually troubled Belgian manicurist, lost in an alien London and murdering men who make advances to her, is a fairly obvious descendant of Irena. 52 Having got away with it once, Lewton ends The Seventh Victim with a more explicit, off-screen suicide – one of the most extraordinary film finishes of the 1940s. That film opens with another doomy quote from Donne. 53 Siegel, Val Lewton, pp. 38–9. 54 Lewton’s secretary, Verna DeMotts, is quoted in Siegel, Val Lewton, p. 40: His film, Cat People, saved RKO when it was practically bankrupt, but they didn’t

gardener came with a rake and shooed the

show much appreciation. Charles Koerner

cheetah back. But for a while there I had a

kept on dreaming up those outrageous

frightening feeling.

titles to stick him with. They didn’t

You might not entirely believe this polished anecdote. 46 Siegel, ‘Tourneur Remembers’, p. 24. 47 Siegel, Val Lewton, p. 105. 48 Siegel, ‘Tourneur Remembers’, p. 24. 49 There’s nothing wrong with a monster if it’s a good monster, and the Night of the Demon fiend is tremendous. It is possible that Tourneur played up in interviews his unwillingness to include exploitable elements in his horror films that he found it slightly embarrassing to admit he had, in fact, endorsed. The controversy about Night of the Demon would seem to have less to do with whether to show the monster as when to show the monster, with the crass producer Hal E. Chester wanting

understand this man at all or what it was he was trying to do. But his movies cost practically nothing to make, so they let him go ahead, although they really wanted more conventional horror pictures. I remember only once did he protest one of Koerner’s decisions by insisting that his Cat People had been a big success. Koerner replied, ‘The only people who saw that film were Negroes and defense workers.’

In Higham and Greenberg, The Celluloid Muse, p. 217, Tourneur countered that Lewton ‘left RKO because the studio chief, an intelligent, sensitive man called Charles Koerner, died, and the new people who came in were tough businessmen. He switched to Universal, but he didn’t live long.’

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55 Siegel, Val Lewton, p. 71. 56 Turner, ‘A Retrospective’, p. 24. 57 Ibid., p. 27. 58 Interview in the Los Angeles Times, quoted in Siegel, Val Lewton, p. 31. 59 Not entirely out of the question in a genre where deaths are always reversible in a sequel: witness the resurrections of such definitively killed characters as Ygor (Bela Lugosi) in Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) in Bride of ReAnimator (1990). 60 The device is reused in The Innocents (1961). 61 This moment prefigures the famous climax of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) as John Wayne is unable to kill Natalie Wood.

62 If Cat People is set in 1940, then The Curse of the Cat People, though released in 1943, must be set in at least 1947. 63 If ever there were an ‘ordinary’ cat werewolf film, this is it. 64 Siegel, ‘Tourneur Remembers’, p. 24. 65 Higham and Greenberg, The Celluloid Muse, p. 219. 66 See ‘Val Lewton and the Forties Cycle’, in Ivan Butler, Horror in the Cinema (London: Zwemmer/Barnes, 1970), pp. 69–74, and ‘Horror, the Soul of the Plot’, in Clarens, Horror Movies, pp. 163–72. 67 Ken Hanke, A Critical Guide to Horror Film Series (New York and London: Garland, 1991), p. 141. 68 Siegel, Val Lewton, pp. 101–2. 69 Bansak, Fearing the Dark, p. 136.

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Credits Cat People USA/1943 US Release 24 December 1942 Distributor RKO Radio Pictures Inc. British Release 12 April 1943 British Distributor RKO Radio Pictures Ltd Copyright Date 1943 Production Company RKO Radio Pictures Inc. Producer Val Lewton Supervisor Lou Ostrow Director Jacques Tourneur Assistant Director Doran Cox Written by DeWitt Bodeen Director of Photography Nicholas Musuraca Special Effects Vernon L. Walker Linwood G. Dunn Editor Mark Robson Assistant Editor Robert Aldrich

Art Directors Albert S. D’Agostino Walter E. Keller Set Decorations Darrell Silvera Al Fields Gowns Renié Music Roy Webb Musical Director C. Bakaleinikoff Orchestrations Leonid Raab John Leipold Recorded by John L. Cass Animal Trainer Mel Koontz CAST Simone Simon Irena Dubrovna Tom Conway Dr Louis Judd Jane Randolph Alice Moore Jack Holt ‘Commodore’ C. R. Cooper Kent Smith Oliver Reed uncredited Steve Soldi organ grinder Alan Napier ‘Doc’ Carver John Piffle ‘The Belgrade’ proprietor

Elizabeth Dunne Miss Plunkett Elizabeth Russell [dubbed by Simone Simon] cat woman Alec Craig zookeeper Dot Farley Mrs Agnew, concierge Theresa Harris Minnie, waitress Charles Jordan bus driver Murdock MacQuarrie shepherd Donald Kerr taxi driver Mary Halsey blonde swimming pool attendant Betty Roadman Mrs Hansen Terry Walker hotel attendant Connie Leon 1st woman in flat Henrietta Burnside 2nd woman in flat Dynamite leopard Dorothy Lloyd cat voice Black and White 6,534 feet 74 minutes

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Bibliography Bansak, Edmund G., Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1995). Benshoff, Harry M., Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). Brosnan, John, The Horror People (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1976). Butler, Ivan, Horror in the Cinema (London: Zwemmer/Barnes, 1970). Clarens, Carlos, Horror Movies: An Illustrated Survey (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968). Dyson, Jeremy, Bright Darkness: The Lost Art of the Supernatural Horror Film (London: Cassell, 1997). Everson, William K., Classics of the Horror Film (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1974). Farber, Manny, ‘Val Lewton: Unorthodox Artistry at RKO’, The Nation, 14 April 1951, in Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn, Kings of the Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975). Fujiwara, Chris, Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998). Gifford, Denis, A Pictorial History of Horror Movies (London: Hamlyn, 1973). Hanke, Ken, A Critical Guide to Horror Film Series (New York and London: Garland, 1991). –––, Hollywood in the Forties (London: Zwemmer/Barnes, 1968). Higham, Charles and Joel Greenberg, The Celluloid Muse: Hollywood Directors Speak (London: Angus and Robertson, 1969).

Johnston, Clare and Paul Willemen, Jacques Tourneur (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1975). Jones, Stephen, The Illustrated Vampire Movie Guide (London: Titan, 1993). –––, The Illustrated Werewolf Movie Guide (London: Titan, 1996). Judd, Louis, The Anatomy of Atavism (New York: Who-Torok, 1942). Katz, Ephraim, The Macmillan International Film Encyclopedia: New Edition (London: Macmillan, 1994). King, Stephen, Danse Macabre (London: Macdonald, 1981). McCarty, John, ‘The Parallel Worlds of Jacques Tourneur’, Cinefantastique, vol. 2 no. 4, Summer 1973. Prawer, S. S., Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Siegel, Joel E., Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972). –––, ‘Tourneur Remembers’, Cinefantastique, vol. 2 no. 4, Summer 1973. Telotte, J. P., Dreams of Darkness: Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985). Thomson, David, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles (London: Little, Brown, 1996). Turner, George, ‘A Retrospective of the “Original” Val Lewton’s Cat People’, Cinefantastique, vol. 12 no. 4, May–June 1982. Williams, Tony, Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1996).