The Great Movies III

The dialogue, a first screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen, contains lines that hint at the bizarre and the erotic. Oliver tells Irena her perfume is "warm and living." Irena says the roars of the big cats in the nearby zoo are "natural and soothing." As the afternoon lengthens, she finally turns on a light, after saying she finds the dark "friendly." Tourneur and his cinematographer, Nicholas Musuraca, who also worked together on the great film noir Out of the Past, are masters of light and shadow. They often place Irena in darkness, cast the silhouettes of other characters on the wall behind her, enclose her with shadows that work like a cage.

Irena and Oliver announce their engagement at a party in a restaurant, where an inexplicable and disturbing thing happens: she is approached by a strange woman (Elizabeth Russell), who affects a catlike appearance and addresses her in Serbian, calling her "sister."We never see this woman again, but her spectre haunts the movie. Are there lesbian notes in her approach to Irena? Perhaps in the sense that she is a powerful animal who challenges Oliver's right to claim a mate?

In their marriage, Irena is fearful, and we understand that she is fearful of herself, of her latent evil. When the extraordinarily patient Oliver observes, "I've never kissed you," Irena tells him: "I've lived in dread of this moment. I've never wanted to love you. I've stayed away from people.... I've fled from the past. Some things you could never know, or understand-evil things." Some of their conversations take place while he stands on one side of her bedroom door and she slumps against the other side.

He begins to work late at the office, where his co-worker Alice (Jane Randolph) is sympathetic. Irena follows him, sees them together, grows jealous, and one of the movie's great sequences shows Alice walking home on a dark and deserted street, followed by footsteps. Nothing precisely happens to her, and we see little but some shadows and some disturbed leaves, but Alice is terrified when she jumps on a bus; she knows she saw something, which she will later describe to Oliver as Irena's "cat form."Her night walk seems to pass the same short span of stone wall again and again; Tourneur edits to make it seem longer. We are aware of the visual trick, yet it evokes a dreamlike quality.

Curiously, Alice, Irena, and Oliver continue as friends, although there is a giveaway moment when they visit a museum together. As he suggests that Irena look at an upstairs exhibit, Oliver uses the word "we" to refer to himself and Alice, not Irena.7his slip betrays him. Later that night, Alice goes for a plunge in the swimming pool at her residential club, and in a genuinely terrifying sequence she treads water in the deserted pool while ... something ... growls and paces, and then she screams. Notice how light reflected from the surface of the pool causes unsettling patterns to creep along the walls.

Irena has been seeing a psychiatrist. Dr. Judd (Tom Conway), a graduate of the Vincent Price school of therapy, talks to her while her face is detached in a circle of light surrounded by darkness. These sessions are not helpful, and she finds more relief by returning again and again to the leopard cage at the zoo. The genius of the film is in its indirection. It doesn't specifically show us horrible things happening. It toys with us, introducing the elements from which horror could emerge. For example, Oliver gives Irena a kitten, which is terrified of her. Having established dark possibilities, Cat People gives us daylight scenes and chirpy supporting characters who don't realize they're skirting danger. At a pet shop run by a woman so cheerful she seems demented, they trade the cat for a canary. The destiny of this canary supplies, in a way, all we need to know about Irena's fundamental nature. Yet she really does love Oliver-love him, and need him, as "the only friend I've ever had."The film evokes the loneliness of the person set aside from humanity, given skills or powers that are a curse; it has the same kind of uneasy sympathy for Irena that Anne Rice has for her vampires. It's not much fun, being a cat woman.

As a group, the films that Val Lewton produced in the 1940s are a landmark in American movie history. Born in the Ukraine, raised in Berlin, a newspaperman and pulp writer, he was a story editor for David O. Selznick before starting his own unit at RKO. Lewton (19o4-51) worked with directors who became important (Tourneur, Mark Robson, Robert Wise), but the films were and still are identified as his; I remember the French director Bertrand Tavernier and the American critic Manny Farber at the 199o Telluride festival, talking about how unusual it was for a producer, not a director, to be the ruling auteur of a group of films.