Jacques
Tourneur
USA,
1942
Writer:
DeWitt Bodeen
Tourneur’s alternative were-tragedy
is a svelt and elegant tale about how sexuality and jealousy makes one woman
dangerous. Certainly, Irena is quite charming, sweet, smart and endearing at
first – Simone Simon barely seems capable of raising her voice – and that means
she is appealing intellectually and disarming. And she’s a Serbian immigrant
and therefore exotic, so it’s easy to see how a decent enough all American chap
might fall for her. She has a warmth and vulnerability that commands empathy
throughout. But this foreignness also comes with troubled ancestry and a
delusion that, when this exotic sexuality is tapped, she’ll become a lethal
panther. This becomes a problem when she senses her husband falling for
another.
But there’s nothing mean to our
central love-triangle: there’s a definite maturity to DeWitt Bodeen’s
screenplay. When Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) must tell Irena that he’s fallen for
someone else, he doesn’t blame Irena for being difficult or stringing him
along, but it’s with regret and acceptance of responsibility. Also, Alice (Jane
Randolph) isn’t some love rival drawn bad, but often suggesting the more
sympathetic actions when dealing with Irena. Moira Wallace writes that “Simone
Simon seems by nature to be more kitten than were-wolf”, but that is surely the
point, that Irena isn’t a siren seductress, a femme fatale to anyone but
herself. After all, “She never lied to us.”
It’s a text wholly built from fear and
phobia, from a woman’s fear of her ancestry and sexuality, and of her loneliness
and her place in social convention. Undoubtedly also due to budgetary constraints,
it nevertheless evokes the eerie and uncanny with a success that a film with
more resources probably would not have achieved. Secondarily, it’s the male
fear that a woman’s troubled sexuality can’t be trusted, perhaps especially if
it’s foreign and exotic. And there is also the hint of lesbianism, not least
when a stranger calls Irena “Sister”. It’s also notable that it’s Alice that
first believes in the threat and powers of Irena, without much hesitation when
she’s confronted by weirdness, while the men mostly patronise, disbelieve and
consign Irena to insanity. The men can’t quite see pass their own agendas, and
in Dr Judd (Tom Conway), his assumption that his privilege and gender trump all
is a wrongheaded arrogance. There are forces at play here that the very
straight characters outside Irena are barely aware of.
The film’s major laziness is in
suggesting some makeshift cross and Christian declaration might fend off
something so primal, as if the film thought it was a somewhat more traditional supernatural
monster movie fighting off a pagan threat (and although this can be attributed
to Oliver’s beliefs, the film does seem to play along). But the bus moment is
one of the genre’s great jump-scares, and there is something truly primal and
fearsome in the similarly iconic swimming pool set piece. Rob Aldam writes,
“Largely
overshadowed by Paul Schrader’s inferior remake, The Cat People is a milestone
in horror movies. The way Lewton and Tourneur use shadow in lieu of an actual
monster completely revolutionised how films are made. There’s so much more
malice in a fleetingly glimpsed silhouette than revealing all your cards to the
audience.”
The use of shadows and light are
exemplary throughout, shadows becoming bars and obscuring the monster and monstrous
so it is always lurking and pending. Tourneur and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca
worked on film noir before and put the chiaroscuro to the best evocative use for
horror. ‘Cat People’ successfully conjures the uncanny and abstract anxiety,
those elements that touch the everyday, perpetual engine of the genre. The monster revealed is our own fear of
ourselves. It’s certainly a text for those who feel like outsiders, even
surrounded by decent, sympathising people.
Paul
Schrader
1982
– USA-Japan
Screenplay: Alan Ormsby
Paul Schrader doesn’t think of this
as a remake of the Jacques Tourneur classic, which he doesn’t seem to rate, and
seems to think the inclusion of a mysterious lady saying “My sister!” is his
homage to the original; but it riffs on the swimming pool scene and the famous
bus jump-shock and in that way follows similar beats to the original.
Schrader’s take is very different and earns that contentious label as a
“re-imagining”, but to reject it as a remake is surely a little disingenuous.
What it does do, like Cronenberg’s
‘The Fly’ and Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’, is to take a beloved source
material and update it successfully, bringing what was all allusion and
suppression in the originals to the surface. For ‘Cat People’, that
means all the kink and sleaze and dodgy sexuality is front and foremost. And
surely Natasja Kinski nude was a selling point, although this was also in
McDowell’s nude period. Oh, and to add incest too. Kinski’s offbeat sexual
appeal where she goes from innocent to seductress when discovering she turns
into a panther when primal urges are released by sex certainly centres the
film. She hangs between Malcolm MacDowell’s sleazy incestuous perversity and John
Heard’s wholesome All American machismo.
This was slightly side-stepped in the
shape-changing cluster including ‘An American Werewolf in London’, ‘The
Howling’ and ‘The Thing’, perhaps because it wasn’t funny or
satirical or outlandish, but I always put them in the same pot. The highpoints
are McDowell’s creepy leaping on the end of a bed, the arm being pulled off,
the unforgettable desert scenes and Giorgio Moroder’s quintessentially Eighties
pulsing synth-score: I even think of the orange tint to the dream-desert sequences
as an Eighties orange. The score is one I have listened to ever since. Its
weaknesses are a couple of moments with female victims that wouldn’t sound out
of place in ‘The Man With Two Brains’, and the iconic pool scene that,
here, seems to imply that Irena can transform at will, which isn’t in the rules
of this version.
The sexuality in ‘Cat People’ walks
a line between arthouse and exploitation and its actual standpoint a little
hard to pin down. Sexuality is primal, unleashes the beast and perversion: even
the ostensibly nice and normal sex between Irena and Paul leads to bondage. Based
on this, Gary Arnold calls a Schrader “an exploitation director with delusions
of grandeur”, but that seems pretty self-evident,
and hitting that sweet spot between conceived “high” and “low” art is genre
privilege. ‘Cat People’ is a near-miss, but still intriguing.
The ending signals tragedy, and it is
conceptually better than the run-of-the-mill monster movie ending that Schrader
talks of, but it also symbolises a woman’s sexuality being caged up by a man
for her own good, and by her own choice. There’s an uneasy murkiness here, but
the elements of arthouse and exploitation tame one another to produce something
that is quite unique, and certainly beguiling, despite and because of its crude edges and pulsating Eightiesness.
