Midnight Movie of the Week #196 - Cat People

Jacques Tourneur's Cat People, perhaps the artistic high point of horror during the 1940s, is one of the most difficult horror films to explain to modern audiences. Part of that's probably because it's mostly a parable about the dangers of the past and a metaphor for repressed sexuality and a bunch of other smart stuff like that, and also probably because we never actually see people who look like cats. This was, after all, just one year after The Wolf Man showed us a man who looked like a wolf - so it would make sense to expect people who look like cats.

What do we get, if not people who look like cats? We get the fascinating Simone Simon as Irena, a Serbian woman living in New York City who becomes convinced that she's a member of a family who turns into panthers when they're sexually aroused. I suppose that's not really hard to explain, but it's a little bit hard to believe. It's not far off from the gypsy culture of The Wolf Man - which keeps popping up in my mind due to its close proximity to this release - but the differences in style between Cat People producer Val Lewton and the folks behind Universals' monster movies are pretty significant.

As I've already mentioned, the obvious difference is Lewton and Tourneur's choice to go with an implied monster over an actual monster. It's the right choice for this movie for multiple reasons. For starters, I can't picture one scenario in which you use makeup or prosthetics to make Simone Simon look like a cat and don't end up with an audience that thinks the film is a huge joke. But, more obvious than that, there's an air of mystery added to the film by the choice to keep things ambiguous.

Much of this is sold by Simon, who portrays Irena as an icy character, but not one who is sufficiently vicious or evil. She's a confused character - moreso when she interacts with the men in her life than usual -who certainly earns our sympathy as she moves through the film. Even as she grows more unstable later in the film - thanks to a juicy (by 1942 standards) love triangle with her husband and one of his co-workers - we still feel a strong sense of pity for the character, because the filmmakers do such a good job of making us feel like she is doomed by her past.

The film builds to a couple of tense sequences - most notably the swimming pool showdown with her husband's lover, which is probably the best use of a swimming pool in a horror movie's final act prior to C.H.U.D. II - that do a fantastic job of making us feel uneasy without any specific visual of Irena's cat form. Future low-budget horror movies owe a lot to Lewton, as Cat People and his other productions set the standard for building tension with minimal resources. Ironically, all of those scares where cats jump out of dark areas at victims are ancestors of Cat People, where Lewton surprises viewers with the screeching brakes of a bus just when we think we're going to get a cat.

There are a surprising number of people who don't back Lewton's approach to horror these days - for example, the great John Carpenter has famously chided his films as being full of "nothing" - but I think there's still something fascinating about the balance between drama and horror in his productions. Cat People could probably work as a drama about a confused woman and her romantic struggles, and the addition of this shapeshifting aspect of her persona still only barely makes the film a horror tale at times. But the way the director and producer sell her affliction - and the way they let it take over the film in the final act - set up Cat People as one of the more intriguing horror films of its era, and make it a great piece of counterprogramming to the monster movies of its day.

Midnight Movie of the Week #126 - The Leopard Man

I had to look up the name of those little clicky clacky musical things that you put on your fingers to make noise in musical settings to write this post.  I used to play with those little things when I was in the high school band - I don't think I ever used them for real musical purposes, but I did use them like a boss - but I never knew their name.  Anyway, they're called castanets (here's what Wikipedia says about them), and they play a crucial role in Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton's wicked little film The Leopard Man.

Imagine yourself at one of those slightly sleazy, slightly exotic, completely captivating naturally beautiful places of the 1940s.  There's a not-quite-Rita-Hayworth dancer named Clo-Clo performing, but she's interrupted by a rival named Kiki who walks onto the show floor with a friggin' leopard.  Clo-Clo, not one to be upstaged, takes her vicious little castanets - which can definitely deserve a place among the most grating musical instruments under the wrong circumstances - and snaps them in the face of the leopard, who promptly dashes from the premises and escapes into the small New Mexico town.

If you've seen The Leopard Man, you don't need to imagine the setting event that I just described. If you haven't, you might think it's a pretty ridiculous set up for a horror tale.  Two showgirls are feuding and bring castanets and a leopard into the fray? Even Elizabeth Berkley wouldn't stoop that low! But, if you know anything about Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur, you know that this type of event isn't played with even a tongue in cheek.  This leopard is serious business, and they don't offer any hint that we should think otherwise. The whole incident is played as a straight forward shock to all characters involved - including the waiter who flashes a freshly clawed hand to the camera - which means we aren't surprised the first time we see a character's blood spill as their life is ended.  Oh, you didn't think blood spilled in films of 1943? Don't tell Lewton that.

Like many horror films that would follow - even in slasher films released more than 40-50 years later - the first victim in the film is a young woman who we barely get the chance to meet. We know her name is Teresa, and later investigation shows that she's portrayed by a 20 year old actress named Margaret Landry who must have just been trying to make a name for herself.  She gets to walk alone, she gets to gasp in fear, and she gets to scream and beg and plead for her life...and that's it.  She has to be one of the first actresses to achieve this "honor" in a horror film.  Looking back, her work stands up to all the screaming first blood victims we'd meet in horror's bloody age.

With plenty of moments that would later become slasher traditions - from an opening voyeuristic camera outside the showgirls' dressing rooms to a police officer discussing traits of a "man who kills for pleasure" - The Leopard Man has an interesting place in the mind of the horror historian.  There are no more than three kills in the film and a few lulls in the proceedings, but Tourneur shows his skill for building tension repeatedly.  This was the third film the director made for Lewton - following the far more famous Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie - but Tourneur's skill for storytelling might be at its best here.

It's easy to miss some of the effortless cuts between characters and storylines at work in The Leopard Man.  This is a film that runs a mere 66 minutes, and a part of me wants to argue that the plot really doesn't take off until around the 50 minute mark.  But a closer inspection shows just how well Tourneur bounces from character to character and involves us in their everyday lives.  For example, Clo-Clo seems like our main character in the opening 10 minutes, but the camera simply moves off of her to Teresa as they pass on the street and goes on with her story from there, bouncing back to other characters when necessary.  Director William Friedkin does a commentary of the film on its DVD, and hypothesizes that Quentin Tarantino may have been influenced by Tourneur's skill for intertwining character paths when he made Pulp Fiction.  Friedkin's assessment seems to be a reach at face value, but I can see his point if I really pay close attention to the story's twists.

The Leopard Man is a fascinating piece of horror history when it's dissected, as there are clear parallels to be drawn to modern cinema favorites.  But it's also a great example of the early Hollywood murder mystery and a dark shocker with a surprisingly morbid ending.  There are plenty of ways a viewer can absorb The Leopard Man - maybe you just want to admire the "acting" of Dynamite, the actor/leopard who also starred in Cat People - which should make it a fun viewing for any lover of classic horror cinema.