Cat People (1942)

So, 1942...

As I said last time, in 1942 there were, according to The Internet Movie Database: 20 feature films released that could be at least loosely categorised as having horror elements; 9 science-fiction; and 10 fantasy. Rene Clair's I Married A Witch appears on two of those lists, and Ghost of Frankenstein on all three, so there's quite a bit of overlap. 39 films in the 3 categories drops to 28 when you remove repetition.

Top of the list for 1942 is the small miracle that is Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur's Cat People, the horror/fantasy that changes everything. Commissioned by RKO to compete -- on a strict budget -- with the Universal Studio monster machine responsible for, among others, the Karloff/Whale Frankenstein and Lugo/Browning Dracula, Cat People is adult, tasteful, urban, psychological, and, perhaps most importantly, contemporary. Rather than villagers with flaming torches we get sex, the city and the long shadows of film noir: horror in a detective film setting.

The film being so up to the minute was due at least as much to the need to economise as it was to any overt desire on producer Lewton's part to create the contemporary horror/fantasy film. Val Lewton, who had been David O. Selznick's arbiter of taste, unacknowledged collaborator and doormat over at MGM for far too long, jumped at the chance to head up his own B-horror movie unit at upstart RKO. He would have almost complete freedom, working within a peculiar framework: they didn't much care how the films turned out as long as he could bring them in on a tiny budget, making use of existing assets such as standing sets and contract players, and they had to have luridly marketable titles from off the top of the head of some studio exec, like Cat People and I Walked With A Zombie.

Lewton, a literate perfectionist with something to prove, had learned how to pinch a penny at MGM, and knew that the best way to make use of a low budget was not to spread it thinly, but to spend it where it would do the most good, and on his best pictures for RKO this meant setting them in the present, which worked marvellously. But no sooner had he proven himself in the low-budget arena than he was given more money and began making costume dramas with Boris Karloff. I think that's sad, good as those Karloff films are. Personally, I find period dress and sets distancing in Hollywood studio soundstage pictures of the 20's to 50's, because they tend to be about as convincing as the ones used in the musicals being made just across the lot. This is particularly disastrous for fantasy film, where suspension of disbelief is so important: to be continually popped out of the action by how clean and pressed the villagers and their clothes are, how new and shiny their pitch forks, how unnatural their dialogue and stagey their delivery, and how that burning windmill -- picturesque though it may be -- is clearly standing in front of a painted sky. Well, unless the film is really something special, I tend to drift. Don't get me wrong: a good studio set can be a joy to behold, and it's nice to see James Whale giving tribute to Caligari in the visuals of his Universal horrors... but maybe it's too nice to generate much in the way of real frisson. The fact that Cat People takes place against the backdrop of the city makes it very immediate, so that it still seems utterly modern all these years later.

Cat People is essentially a Freudian werewolf tale: urban architect falls in love with repressed young woman who turns into a panther when sexually excited. The image that says it all is contained in the shot (pictured at top) of said architect and co-worker/rival for his affections being stalked in their office late at night: note the T-squares on the wall, like useless substitutes for crucifixes to ward off vampires. Also note that the film's VanHelsing, when he arrives, comes in the form of a sleazy psychiatrist rather than an expert in the occcult. Not that it saves him...

Though Cat People was directed by Jacques Tourneur, the Val Lewton seal of quality is writ large on every film that came out of his RKO horror unit, and the story of that unit and the people involved is one of the most fascinating to come out of the Hollywood studio system. Tourneur would remember his short time with these people as the most creative and rewarding of his career. Working on an impossibly tight schedule, Lewton devised a formula -- "A love story, three scenes of suggested horror and one of actual violence." -- and a very economical theory of horror: that the viewer's imagination was capable of conjuring more terrifying things than he could afford to show them, and the best way of allowing this to take place was through the strategic placement of lights to generate shadows. A true auteur despite never being credited as a director on any of them, Lewton damaged his health and took years off his life pulling all-nighters during the intense and abbreviated production schedules of his films, obsessively rewriting and polishing the scripts without credit, overseeing all aspects of production, and turning a motley assortment of B-teamers into crack professionals, only to have the studio promote them out from under him. Marc Robson and Robert Wise, who both became fine directors under Lewton's tutelage, only wound up working for him as punishment for having worked closely with Orson Welles as editors on Citizen Kane and during the self-destructive genius's spectacular flameout while making The Magnificent Ambersons!

How we wind up with a bio-pic of Ed Wood, but not one on Lewton's horror unit is a mystery to me. Happily, there are a couple of books (Bansak's Fearing The Dark: The Val Lewton Career is the one currently in print) and a couple of documentaries on the subject, and all of the films are available in one of the best DVD box sets ever released. It's a fascinating body of work, complete in one place, and I cannot recommend it more highly.

That's it: my first real blog entry. Next up we find out what else was shaking in 1942, and then it's onward to '43 and backward to '41!