by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 9 I broke open a boxed set of DVD’s I’d just received from Amazon.com, The Val Lewton Collection, a set of the nine horror classics producer Val Lewton made for RKO Radio Pictures between 1942 and 1946. This box came out in 2008 but I didn’t buy it then because I was upset that it didn’t include the two non-horror subjects Lewton made for RKO in that time, Mademoiselle Fifi (an adaptation of the Guy de Maupassant short story that had also been the distant inspiration for John Ford’s Stagecoach) and Youth Runs Wild (a pioneering film about juvenile delinquency that was about 10 years ahead of its time). I was hoping to get the Lewton box by Hallowe’en so I could screen my husband Charles these decidedly odd, fascinating films again (I had some of them in off-the-air recordings from Turner Classic Movies and others, but not all together and not in professional transfers). The disc I chose to screen was the one containing Lewton’s first film as a producer, Cat People (1942), and its nominal sequel, The Curse of the Cat People (1944). After a long stint as West Coast story editor for David O. Selznick – during which he advised Selznick to pass on making Gone with the Wind, though fortunately his East Coast story editor, Kay Brown, talked him into it. The last time I watched Lewton’s second film as a producer, I Walked with a Zombie, I got the impression that Lewton’s real reason for not wanting Selznick to make Gone with the Wind was its racism. I Walked With a Zombie is about a white family living in the West Indies and, though it is set in contemporary times, they are still living a life of privilege based on a fortune accumulated with slave labor, and the last time I watched it I thought, “If this is the movie Val Lewton wanted to make about slavery and the plantation system, no wonder he didn’t want Selznick to make Gone with the Wind!”
Lewton got his chance to produce “B”-budget horror movies from Charles Koerner, who had been appointed studio head of RKO after his predecessor, George Schaefer, was fired largely because of the tons of money the studio had lost on Schaefer’s pet hire, Orson Welles. Koerner announced that from now on RKO films would be based on “showmanship instead of genius” – an obvious slap at Welles – and he demoted the team Welles had assembled to work on Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, including film editors Robert Wise and Mark Robson, both of whom became directors under Lewton’s sponsorship, to the “B” ranks. Fortunately, they ended up working on Lewton’s unit, and Lewton grabbed the chance to work with a Welles-trained technical crew because he had already decided to use subtlety, shadows and sound effects to make his movies and scare audiences. As I wrote in my blog post two years ago on Lewton’s fourth (and, I think, best) movie, The Seventh Victim, “Lewton was given three restrictions -- his films couldn’t cost more than $150,000 to make, they couldn’t run longer than 75 minutes, and the titles would be given to him by RKO’s marketing department based on what they thought they could sell to the horror audience -- but within those limits he could do pretty much whatever he wanted.” Lewton picked Cat People for his first RKO production because he had a phobic fear of cats himself, and he developed the story around a foreign woman because the star assigned to his unit, an on-the-downgrade Simone Simon, had an accent even though she was French and the character she plays here is Serbian. Lewton and his collaborators, director Jacques Tourneur (who was also French, and one wonders if he directed Simon in French the way Josef von Sternberg famously directed Marlene Dietrich in German) and writer DeWitt Bodeen, originally wanted to set the film in Serbia and have it deal with a village whose inhabitants apparently go along with the Nazi occupiers but secretly turn into were-cats at night to slaughter them.
Knowing that to do this on a $150,000 budget would be impossible, Lewton had Bodeen rewrite the story to take place in contemporary New York City and make the central character, Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), a Serbian immigrant making a living doing sketches for a fashion house. She has a meet-cute with Oliver Reed (Kent Smith), an engineer for a ship constructing firm, when he runs into her at a zoo where she’s doing sketches of a black panther that fascinates her. Irena tears off the page on which she’s done her latest panther sketch and tries to throw it away, but misses the trash can. Oliver picks up the sketch and points to a nearby sign, “Let no one say, and say it to your shame/That all was beauty here until you came.” Irena then makes another sketch, which she also discards, and Oliver doesn’t open the crumpled page but we get to see it: it’s a drawing of the panther with a sword stuck through it (the same motif we’ve seen in the opening title). Oliver invites Irena to tea, and rather than go somewhere the two share tea in Irena’s apartment, a brownstone. “I’ve often wondered what’s behind these brownstones,” Oliver says, and when they go in we see what’s behind this one, at least: the famous entry hall Mark-Lee Kirk designed for Orson Welles’ film The Magnificent Ambersons. (As I’ve noted in these pages before, RKO probably amortized their losses on that movie just by how often they reused its sets.) Oliver notices a statuette on Irena’s coffee table, and Irena explains it’s a statue of King John of Serbia in full armor holding a sword with a cat impaled on it. Irena explains that during King John’s reign he had to deal with a group of Satanists who had taken over the village Irena later came from, and while most of the Satanic witches were put to death, a few escaped into the mountains and became cats after dark, terrorizing the populace.
Oliver and Irena get engaged and ultimately marry, despite the unease and discomfort of Oliver’s co-worker Alice Moore (Jane Randolph), who was in love with Oliver herself. Only at the wedding party Irena is confronted by an odd-looking woman who resembles a cat. She addresses her in Serbian and Irena explains, “She called me her sister!” Oliver moves into Irena’s brownstone but the two are unhappy together because Irena fears that if she ever allows herself to become sexually aroused by her husband, she’ll turn into a were-cat and kill him. Oliver is convinced this is only a fantasy from her childhood and the tales she heard while growing up, and at Alice’s suggestion he hires a psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway in full “Falcon” mode), to treat her. Dr. Judd hypnotizes her and she has a rather crudely animated dream of cats – an effect Lewton and company may have borrowed from the 1941 MGM version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which similar images accompany one of Spencer Tracy’s transformations between the title roles – but draws back from seeing him again. Irena starts stalking Alice, and in the film’s most famous scene Alice is walking along a tree-lined path at night with Irena following her. Suddenly there is a loud, gigantic hissing noise on the soundtrack and we think for sure Irena has changed into a cat-woman and is attacking Alice – but the noise is revealed as merely the sound of air-brakes on a bus. (Lewton used this sort of sound effect – scary at first, even though its ultimate source is innocuous – in virtually all his films, and his crew even started calling it “the bus.”) Alice, no fool she, takes the opportunity to escape Irena by getting on the bus.
Later there’s a scene in which Alice is swimming at night in a pool at the building where she works – apparently the employees of this film can breeze in at all hours of the day or night and catch up on their workloads – and she’;s scared out of her wits by sinister noises even though she doesn’t see anyone there. However, when she gets out of the pool she finds that her bathrobe has been slashed to ribbons as if by the claws of a giant cat. Alice shows the slashed robe to Dr. Judd and tells him she thinks Irena in cat-woman form clawed it. Dr. Judd sees Irena two more times, and the last time he makes a pass at her – either out of lust or just to demonstrate that Irena can handle sexual stimuli in a normal human fashion. Instead Irena turns into a cat and kills him, though as with the entire movie (except for one scene in the office at night in which RKO’s executives pulled rank on Lewton, Tourneur and Bodeen and told them to have an actual panther prowling around the office, where the filmmakers had wanted to stay consistent and suggest the were-beast’s presence with sound effects alone) we’re carefully shown very few details, just bits and pieces of two humans engaged in a life-or-death struggle. Wounded in the struggle with Dr. Judd – he had a cane with a sword in it which he used to defend himself – Irena retreats to the zoo and opens the panther’s cage with a key she stole earlier when the zookeeper carelessly left it in the lock. Irena frees the panther – who promptly gets run over by a truck driver and is killed – and she lays on the floor of the enclosure as she dies.
Cat People was a huge box-office hit – it reportedly grossed $4 million on a production budget of $135,000 – and it no doubt helped RKO recoup some of its losses on Orson Welles. It was remade in 1982 with Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell, directed and co-written by Paul Schrader, but I avoided that version after reviewers warned me that Schrader had jettisoned Lewton’s less-is-more approach to horror and made the film explicitly sexual and gruesome. (I’m convinced there’d be a modern audience for Lewton’s style of horror cinema; when I saw Wes Craven’s Scream I loved the first hour and a half, which seemed to be aiming for the Lewton touch and which I found delightfully scary. Alas, for the last half-hour Craven abandoned artistry and instead gave the modern-day horror audience what it wants by splashing blood all over the screen.) The 1942 Cat People is a fascinating film that holds up beautifully, and Charles noted how plainly the film’s first few reels were shot – up until the echoey sound effects cut in and the mood becomes more sinister and Gothic. It’s a film that works on every level, even though the actors were either character types or faded stars (like Jack Holt, who plays Oliver’s and Alice’s employer, “The Commodore”), and is an example of how sheer ingenuity and skill can make a fantastic film on a limited budget.
