I have a few DVD sets corresponding to the original Universal Monsters. Each set contains all the solo movies associated with each monster while the crossovers are placed where they fit best. However, Universal made some interesting choices on what else to include. The invisibility special effect clearly held a place of pride for the studio, such that the Invisible Man box set basically included all the movies that used the invisibility gimmick, even if they had no connection whatsoever to the Invisible Man series. That meant I got a pretty good comedy (The Invisible Woman) and a rather mediocre spy movie (The Invisible Agent).
But over on the Wolf-Man set was a movie, barely over an hour, called The She-Wolf of London. Featuring a young June Lockhart, that movie is about a rich young woman who believes she turns into a killer werewolf by night. However, that movie sucks. It’s bad. Really bad. I couldn’t even make a joke about Lockhart once also playing Lassie because it turns out there were no supernatural shenanigans in the entire movie. Heck, Lockhart wasn’t even the killer. A greedy servant was trying to trick the nervous young heiress into thinking she was. So, no female werewolves in the movie.
It was with that running through my mind that I approached 1942’s Cat People. Like She-Wolf of London, it features a young woman who believes she can transform into a wild animal and may be killing people. It also runs a little over an hour and no monster appears onscreen due to the low budget. But where She-Wolf failed, Cat People soared, and makes for an excellent introduction to the work of producer Val Lewton.
Lewton may have gotten RKO to give Cat People the go-ahead, but that didn’t mean the studio gave him much money to make it. As such, he worked with what he had to create horror of the mind if not the body. Using pre-built sets as often as he could, the monster of the movie is never visible. There are a couple shots of a panther, but no transformation sequences. Those always happen in the dark or off-screen or both. And yet, the movie really works.
Perhaps because the best horrors are the ones in the mind, the movie tells the story of Irena Dubrovna (French actress Simone Simon). A Serbian-born fashion designer, she catches the eye of engineer Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) while sketching at the zoo. Oliver gets to know her a bit, but when she tells him a story from Serbia about how the Serbian King John once razed a village for housing a cult of witches that could transform into large cats, with only the cleverest escaping to the mountains, he disbelieves it. She, on the other hand, not only believes it to be true but worries she might be descended from the witches. Considering how skittish and hostile most animals behave around her, especially cats, that makes sense. That doesn’t stop the two from getting married though Irena won’t consummate the relationship under the assumption that she will transform into a cat and kill Oliver if they do.
Naturally, that doesn’t go over well forever. Oliver sends her to a psychiatrist while he and his assistant Alice (Jane Randolph) start to fall in love. And if there’s one thing that disappointed me about this movie, it’s Alice. The actress is fine and the character fun enough, but there’s a part of me that really wishes we could see more platonic friendships between the sexes in fiction, and it looked like Cat People might have been going that way with Alice at first. But it doesn’t, justifying Irena’s jealousy and being just a bit more predictable in the end.
So, does Irena change into a cat? Well, that would be telling. What makes this movie is just how effective it is in ratcheting up the tension as Irena begins to stalk Alice through town. And I gotta say, these scenes really work. Randolph, whether walking down a dark street or going for a late night swim in a dark indoor pool, hears things and gets increasingly panicked with only odd sounds and maybe the sight of something moving around her. At one point, what sounds like a hissing panther turns out to be the hissing of a bus’s breaks. That allows a sense of relief as it gives Alice and the audience a temporary escape from the horror of the moment.
Using shadow, sound, and implication, this movie works without once showing a werecat of any kind. There’s a reason old horror movies like this one still hold up. Check it out if you can.
Grade: A-
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