Arguably Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur's most famous film,
Cat People is the story of Irena, descended from a group of Serbian villagers who, around 1500 C.E., had become satanists and witches and then fled into the mountains as cats when the Emperor came to slay them. She believes that if she is ever aroused to passion she will transform into a great cat and kill her lover. Somehow this level of crazy does not discourage the very nice man who falls for her and he continues to struggle and fight to make her happy and to marry her.
Will Irena turn into a panther like the ones she sketches at the zoo? Will she kill her nice husband and possibly her rival who is in love with him and actually isn't crazy? Or is Cat People just an allegory for a man in a relationship with a Cluster B Personality Disorder woman? You won't know until you see
Cat People.
This is a bit of a challenging movie in that the set up is very long and very little actually happens for the first 43 minutes of the movie. As much of a Lewton/Tourneur fan as I am, and remembering a fondness for this film (though more than a decade has passed since I last saw it), I was getting pretty bored and restless before the iconic stalking scene finally arrives and the dark side of Irena's (totally Cluster B) personality emerges. It is a great scene, replete with Tourneur's evocative shadows and the interesting idea of having no music at all during the scene, just silence and footsteps.
Very effective.
But the most exciting scene of the film and the first one that suggests real Horror comes when Irena's rival for her husband's love (you really can't blame him), Alice, goes for a swim and Irena drops by for a visit.
This is the best scene of the film, probably, and was recreated (as was the stalking scene if I remember) by Paul Schraeder in his 1980s remake of the film (which is either totally Rifftraxable or really awesome, depending on your point of view).
There's a lot of Christian mumbo-jumbo in this about sin and living a good Christian life and whatnot that I really could have done without and makes the film very of its time and very exclusive to Christians but I guess one has to endure that sort of thing sometimes if one's going to watch old movies. The psychiatry aspect is a lot more interesting. The Nice Man convinces Irena to see a psychiatrist, played by Tom Conway from
I Walked With A Zombie (and the Falcon series), and man is he something. Arrogant, condescending, and ultimately professionally inappropriate, he uses his position to engineer a potential affair with Irena. Lucky for him he carries a sword-cane. This particular vein actually allows the movie to become almost edgy for its time, which it needed to recover from the long buildup.
Well, I'll tell ya, as someone who has been the victim of multiple women with Borderline Personality Disorder (as have two of my closest friends) I was really struck by how strongly this film suggested to me that this was just that story with a panther in it. A good, kind man who describes himself as “never been unhappy” attracts the attention and is strongly “drawn to” a woman who has fantastic ideas, mood swings, jealousy, and magical thinking and refuses to work with her psychiatrist and makes him miserable, nearly ruining his life? Sounds pretty textbook.
But it's an enjoyable film and the second half really takes off and gives the audience some suspense and even a little action. I'd have to admit that after revisiting this, I would prefer to watch most of Tourneur's other genre films ahead of this one, including
The Leopard Man,
I Walked With A Zombie,
Night Of The Demon, and even
Out Of The Past, and I think I actually prefer Lewton's
Curse Of The Cat People. I know that
Cat People is considered their "classic" and that I'm "supposed to" prefer it to
The Leopard Man... but I don't.
Still, it's a nice enough film and it's canon and I can live with that. Something I would probably watch every five or ten years though as opposed to
I Walked With A Zombie, say, which I watch about every other year.
Post Script - I find it really odd that the score to this film, during the suspenseful scenes, is almost identical to
A Nightmare On Elm Street. The "One, Two, Freddy's Comin' For You" melody and the derivations of it that are used to create fear and tension in scenes from that movie (like Tina's death-scene, outside) sounds exactly like the score during suspenseful scenes here. Like so much so that there are only two possibilities. One is that the music is a pre-existing piece that was used as the basis for the suspenseful themes of both films. The other is that Craven straigh-up ripped it off. That said, I cannot be the first person to discover this so the latter seems unlikely or there’d be dragging all over the internet over it. Still, there is no way the filmmakers did not get the music from this very famous Horror movie that they would definitely have seen.
I think it's really strange though that there is no comment about this anywhere on the internet that I can find when they are so obviously the same music.
The more I try to research this, the more puzzled I become. Elm Street composer Charles Bernstein doesn't mention any inspiration beyond a nursery rhyme or skipping rhyme and never talks about
Cat People. Even if they are derived, totally unknowingly, from the same source, they are just too damn similar for this to be wild coincidence.
Anyone with any insight, it would be appreciated.