ELEGANT EROTIC HORROR PROWLS A CITY’S SHADOWS.
Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), a fashion artist born in Serbia and recently arrived in Manhattan, is approached by shipping engineer Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) as she sketches a black panther at the Central Park Zoo. She asks him to tea at her apartment, where he learns of her obsessive fear that she has inherited a curse from her mother and the devil-worshipping inhabitants of their Serbian village, and will turn into a deadly werecat if she ever gives in to passion for a man. Oliver is more intrigued than frightened and soon asks her to marry him, but her fear prevents the marriage from being consummated. Oliver convinces her to consult a psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), while Oliver seeks solace in a close relationship with his assistant, Alice Moore (Jane Randolph), who makes no secret of her attraction to him. Irena reads Alice’s intentions correctly and begins to resent her intensely. And soon, Dr. Judd seems to have an unethically personal reason to cure Irena of her sex phobia.
One night, while Alice is swimming in a darkened indoor pool, a ferocious, growling beast stalks her from the shadows. She screams, and Irena turns on the lights, saying she is only looking for Oliver. She leaves, and Alice discovers her bathrobe shredded, as if by claws. Despite being warned by Alice, Dr. Judd contrives to gain access to the Reeds’ apartment, and when he tries to force his sexual “cure,” whether or not Irena’s cat fantasies are real becomes frighteningly apparent. But in the end we are still left wondering: Was the panther in the zoo Irena’s alter ego? Or was she the panther’s?
Cat People was a completely sensible attempt by RKO to capitalize on the success of Universal’s The Wolf Man, and DeWitt Bodeen’s intelligent, tightly structured script lived up to its inspiration. It was the first of a half dozen thrillers Val Lewton produced for the studio during the war years, gaining him the critical reputation of an auteur usually reserved for directors, not producers. Lewton shrewdly stretched his limited budget by suggesting instead of showing the horrific elements, letting shadows and the audience’s imagination do the heavy lifting. As Lewton told the Los Angeles Times, “We tossed away the horror formula right from the start. No masklike faces hardly human, with gnashing teeth and hair standing on end.” The quote should leave no doubt that he had indeed seen and evaluated The Wolf Man. Lewton continued: “But take a sweet love story, or a story of sexual antagonisms, about people like the rest of us, not freaks, and cut in your horror here and there, by suggestion, and you’ve got something. Anyhow, we think you have.”
Alice is trapped in a pool by a growling, unseen animal.
Irena in her strikingly decorated Manhattan apartment
Cat People is every bit as engrossing as The Wolf Man, with almost no reliance on special effects or marathon makeup ordeals. The famous swimming pool sequence does include the animated silhouette of a prowling black panther moving in the shadows, but it is almost subliminal and arguably not even needed. As Variety commented, “Fans of horror subjects will find Cat People a distinctive piece of entertainment. Its marrow-chilling potentialities for lovers of the eerie build to believable peaks of spine-tingling, hair-raising suspense without once resorting to fake melodramatics or overstaging.”