Cat People (1942)
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
A Serbian émigré in Manhattan believes that, because of an ancient curse, any physical intimacy with the man she loves will turn her into a feline predator.
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What critics compared Cat People to
CAT PEOPLE, original screen play by DeWitt Bodeen; directed by Jack Tourneur; produced by Val Lewton for RKO Radio Pictures.
So let's jump right into the first, most famous, and by most accounts best of the lot, 1942's Cat People , written by first-time screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen, and directed by Jacques Tourneur.
Having established dark possibilities, "Cat People" gives us daylight scenes and chirpy supporting characters who don't realize they're skirting danger.
The ending of the film is quite different than the ending of the original 1942 version of "Cat People."
Cat People is based on a 1942 horror film, but it is distinguished by substance and subtlety, not shock value.
Jacques Tourneur's immortal 1942 original version of Cat People is a wonderful exercise in the macabre.
In league with recent items by Jennifer Kent and Ari Aster, James, like Rose Glass and Romola Garai, has concocted an art-house mood piece which recalls the 1940s era of Val-Lewton films, particularly those B-pictures directed by Jacques Tourneur, like Cat People (1942) or The Leopard Man (1943), which were predicated on horrific flights of fancy but depended upon imbalance and unease through the power of suggestion and the playful teasing of troubling imagery.
There’s a fairly nail-biting confrontation sequence at a deserted swimming pool, and while I enjoyed the tension—and the echoes of Tourneur’s Cat People —I slightly regretted the shift away from a pensive, nervous register into an all-out showdown.
Bava’s film was one six that inspired Suspiria , the rest being Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), David Hand’s aforementioned Disney-produced Snow White And The Seven Dwarves (1937), Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942), Neorealism founders Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti, along Mauro Bolognini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Franco Rossi’s Le streghe ( The Witches, 1967), and Brian De Palma’s Phantom Of Paradise (1974), which Harper also starred in.
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There's a scene in the original " Cat People " (1942) where a woman goes swimming at an indoor pool after hours.
Even the famous shock in 1942's Cat People when the bus hisses into the frame would've been diluted if something like it had pierced the soundtrack every ten minutes.
Like horror classics ranging from Cat People (1942) to The Haunting (1963) to The Blair Witch Project (1999), it suggests its terrors rather than explicitly showing them, which leaves far more to the imagination and sends more genuine chills up the spine.
That urge is all the stronger because she is played by Taraneh Alidoosti, who took the title role in “About Elly,” and who has one of those neat round faces that have held the screen since the infancy of cinema, shaded by different moods: a dash of the vamp, for Clara Bow; queenly wit, for Claudette Colbert; waspishness, for Myrna Loy; and a hint of whiskers, for Simone Simon, in “Cat People.”
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While the central horror is fully revealed, there are some great shots of the trees waving and rustling while everyone waits in anticipation and fear—just as in the classic Night of the Demon (and also in Tourneur’s other classic horror film, 1942’s Cat People ).
Jacques Tourneur's Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943) hinge on their heroines' dread of being vulnerable to sexual predators.