The Great Movies III

The same reality is true of some of the stunts in Cabiria. There is a scene where a city's walls are besieged by warriors on ladders, and others in a wicker basket are raised high up at the end of a crane. The city defenders push the ladders off the walls and use lances to overturn the basket. Yes, there are probably piles of straw down below to cushion the warriors as they land, but look how far they fall while they are still onscreen. The risks they are taking are chilling.

Consider another scene where warriors with shields approach a city wall. Eight of them (as I recall) bend double and put their shields on their backs. Six climb onto those shields, bend double, and put their own shields on their backs. Four more stand on them, and two more on them, and at last the hero is able to climb this human pyramid and reach the top of the wall. This is a stunt taking place in one shot before our eyes, and if the legs of one of the warriors had buckled, it would not have been a pretty sight. Because all of this is so palpably real, there is an undeniable sense of wonder in seeing it achieved, as there is when Douglas Fairbanks Sr. or Buster Keaton do their own stunts in shots deliberately photographed so we can see they were not faked.

The glory of this restoration of Cabiria is that almost all of it is sharp and clear. My laserdisc version is so murky you can't see and appreciate the beauty of the sets and costumes. Because the film's story moves in a stately fashion, because intertitles introduce more characters and plotlines than are probably necessary, because the acting is broad and the gestures large, we don't get involved emotionally. But there are benefits as well as drawbacks to Pastrone's epic style.

The movie feels old, and by that I mean older than 1914. It feels like a view of ancient times, or at least of those times as imagined a century ago. We are looking into two levels of a time machine. Silent films in general create a reverie state for me; sound films are more realistic, more immediately gripping, but in a silent film I find myself dreamier, more drawn into meditations about the nature of life and time. These people are all dead, but here they are as they were on that day in 1914, boldly telling a story in a new medium, trusting it would reach audiences all over the world, and little suspecting that ninety-two years later moviegoers would still be climbing to the top of another palace, the one at Cannes, to see them.

at People is constructed almost entirely out of fear. There wasn't a budget for much of anything else. It exists on eight or nine sets, the running time is only seventy-three minutes, it has few special effects, there are no major stars, the violence is implied or dreaded but not much seen. Yet the film, made as a B picture for only $135,000, became RKO's top grosser for 1942, bringing in $4 million, compared to the studio's Citizen Kane at $500,000 in 1941. It renewed the careers of its producer Val Lewton, its director Jacques Tourneur, and its star, the French actress Simone Simon; it inspired ten more macabre titles from Lewton's production unit and was copied all over Hollywood-because it was scary, and because it was cheap. What was hard to copy was its artistry.

Cat People wasn't frightening like a slasher movie, using shocks and gore, but frightening in an eerie, mysterious way that was hard to define; the screen harbored unseen threats, and there was an undertone of sexual danger that was more ominous because it was never acted upon. Its heroine is a beautiful woman who never sleeps with her new husband (indeed she never even kisses him) because she fears that passion could turn her into a panther. The film magnifies her dread by exploiting the fear some people have of cats: they're sneaky and devious and creep up on you, and are associated with Satan.

These dark undertones are framed by a story of everyday life. Irena (Simon) is sketching a panther at the zoo when she meets the clean-cut and well-behaved architect Oliver Reed (Kent Smith). He walks her home, she asks him in for tea, and they fall in love. She talks of her village in Serbia, of the belief that it sheltered satanic cultists who could take the form of cats. Good King John tried to kill these cat people, but some fled into the mountains, where they are said to live to this day. Irena secretly fears she is one of those people.