154. Cat People (1942)

Directed By Jacques Tourneur

Synopsis

Serbian girl is haunted by tales of cat people from her native village and fear she might be one of them. She is! Poor Psychiatrist.

Review

Sometimes it it from the mouth of B-Movies that we get the truth. In this case truth is beauty and beauty truth. The film is beautifully shot, it regains some of the visual wonder present in cinema before the advent of sound. When sound came around the fascination with the image seemed to have lost itself simply to big epic shots loosing the love of subtlety that was so present when all you had was the image to concentrate on.

Then Jacques Tourneur comes in and the subtlety is back, you cast your mind back to German Expressionism to find comparisons to Murnau and Lang. And this guy is making quite a crappy B Movie about sexy ladies that transform into cats. But it doesn't really matter. The lighting is masterful, from bottom lighting of table lamps to the walls light up by pool lights with just the water reflecting off them while menacing shadows are cast on them.

The main character Irene is even kind of portrayed like a Maria form Metropolis when sitting on the Psychiatrist chair with a single halo of white light in her face. The dream sequence incoorporates animation into the film the whole thing is full of innovation. The story and the acting are completely secondary to the brilliance of the director and that is something I have frankly been missing. The villain/heroine of the film is also one of the most sympathetic monsters since the one from Frankenstein. Watch it.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

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 a black panther 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.

Trailer: