Cat People (1942 film)

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Cat People
Image:Catpeople1942.jpg
Directed by	Jacques Tourneur
Produced by	Val Lewton
Written by	DeWitt Bodeen
Starring	Simone Simon Kent Smith Tom Conway Jane Randolph Jack Holt Elizabeth Russell
Music by	Roy Webb
Cinematography	Nicholas Musuraca
Editing by	Mark Robson
Distributed by	RKO Radio Pictures Inc.
Release date(s)	Image:Flag of the United States.svg December 6, 1942
Running time	73 min.
Country	Image:Flag of the United States.svg United States
Language	English
Followed by	The Curse of the Cat People
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Cat People is a 1942 horror film which tells the story of a young Serbian woman, Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) who is haunted by the myth of the cat people of her village. Kent Smith portrayed her husband Oliver Reed, Tom Conway played psychiatrist Dr. Louis Judd and Jane Randolph was Alice, Oliver's colleague.

The movie was produced by Val Lewton. The writing is credited to DeWitt Bodeen, but Tourneur, Roy Webb, Lewton and his secretary all contributed to the script. It was directed by Jacques Tourneur, and the cinematographer was Tourneur's sometime collaborator Nicholas Musuraca. It was followed by a sequel, The Curse of the Cat People, in 1944.

A remake using the same title was made in 1982. The later Cat People was directed by Paul Schrader and starred Nastassja Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, and John Heard.

In 1993, Cat People was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Contents 1 Synopsis 2 Production details 3 Reception 4 Notes 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Synopsis

Irena Dubrovna is a Serbian-born fashion artist living in New York City that falls in love with and marries "average-joe" Oliver Reed, but she is deathly afraid that, when sexually aroused, she will transform into a panther and kill somebody. She believes that she is descended from a race of people who could transform themselves into cats, from a tale dating from Ancient Egypt.

The film is notable for frightening audiences through the suggestion of unseen horrors with cast shadows and ambiguous sound effects, specifically in the celebrated swimming pool sequence. The panther remains unseen until the final scenes of the film, although Simone Simon displays increasingly catlike behavior and the viewer is bombarded by images of cats in paintings and statues. The final, extremely brief view of Irena transforming into a black panther and attacking Judd was included over the objections of the director, who wanted to keep the entire concept as mysterious as possible.

Although Cat People is usually categorized as a horror movie, many film critics also consider it a film noir, as Irena assumes many of the traits of both femme fatale and the typical noir hero alienated from conventional society, psychologically wounded and morally ambiguous.

[edit] Production details

The film was shot with a budget of under $140,000. Sets left over from previous, higher-budgeted RKO productions—notably the staircase from The Magnificent Ambersons—were utilized.

Lewton and his production team claim credit for inventing the popular horror film technique called the "bus". The term came from the scene where Irena is walking behind Alice; the audience expects Irena to turn into a panther at any moment and attack her. At the most tense point, when the camera focuses on Alice's confused and terrified face, the silence is shattered by what sounds like a hissing panther—but it is a bus pulling over to pick her up. After the excitement dies down, the audience is left uncertain whether anything supernatural or life-threatening actually happened. This technique has been adapted into a great many horror movies since then. Anytime a movie creates a scene where the tension rises and dissipates into nothing at all, merely an empty boo!, it is a "bus".

[edit] Reception

Reviews of the film were positive when the film was first released.^{[citation needed]}

Today, the film still has a cult following. TV Guide's review of the film praised the film's cast:

Superbly acted (with Simon evoking both pity and chills), Cat People testifies to the power of suggestion and the priority of imagination over budget in the creation of great cinema. The film was Lewton's biggest hit, its viewers lured in by such bombastic advertising as "Kiss me and I'll claw you to death!"—a line more lurid than anything that ever appeared onscreen.

This film was referenced in the novel Kiss of the Spider Woman by Argentine novelist Manuel Puig, in which two inmates pass the time by discussing the films one of them has seen. Though this movie is not mentioned by name, and some of the details are not recalled accurately, the parallels to the plot, the mention of Jane Randolph as one of the stars, and the protagonist's name being Irena clearly indicate that Puig was speaking about this film.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Val Lewton Horror Collection DVD documentary 2005

[edit] External links

• Cat People (1942) at the Internet Movie Database
• Cat People (1942) at the TCM Movie Database
• Cat People (1942) at All Movie Guide
• Cat People (1942) at Rotten Tomatoes
• Review of Cat People DVD at Blogcritics

v • d • e Films directed by Jacques Tourneur

Tout Ça Ne Vaut Pas L'Amour (1931) • Pour Etre Aime (1933) • Les Filles De La Concierge (1934) • The Man in the Barn (1937) • They All Come Out (1939) • Nick Carter, Master Detective (1939) • Phantom Raiders (1940) • Doctors Don't Tell (1941) • Cat People (1942) • I Walked with a Zombie (1943) • The Leopard Man (1943) • Days of Glory (1944) • Experiment Perilous (1945) • Canyon Passage (1946) • Out of the Past (1947) • Berlin Express (1948) • Easy Living (1949) • The Flame and the Arrow (1950) • Stars in My Crown (1950) • Circle of Danger (1951) • Anne of the Indies (1951) • Way of a Gaucho (1952) • Appointment in Honduras (1953) • Stranger on Horseback (1955) • Wichita (1955) • Great Day in the Morning (1956) • Nightfall (1957) • Night of the Demon (1957) • The Fearmakers (1958) • The Giant of Marathon (1959) • Timbuktu (1959) • The Comedy of Terrors (1964) • War-Gods of the Deep (1965)

de:Katzenmenschen (1942)

fr:La Féline (film, 1942) it:Il bacio della pantera (film 1942) ja:キャット・ピープル pt:Cat People (1942) ru:Люди-кошки (фильм, 1942) fi:Kissaihmisiä