Cat People (1942) Supernatural Horror Noir Masterpiece

Directed by Jacques Tourneur. 

Tourneur  directed I Walked With A Zombie, The Leopard Man, Out Of The Past, The Berlin Express and Nightfall.  Screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen. Produced by Val Lewton, 

Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca (Stranger on the Third Floor, The Fallen Sparrow, The Seventh Victim, Deadline at Dawn, Woman on Pier Thirteen, Roadblock, The Blue Gardenia, The Hitch-Hiker, Split Second). Music by Roy Webb. Sound by John L. Cass.

The film starts Simone Simon (La bête humaine) as Irena Dubrovna, Kent Smith (Nora Prentiss, The Damned Don't Cry, The Night Stalker) as Oliver Reed, Tom Conway (Grand Central Murder, I Walked With A Zombie, The Seventh Victim) as Dr. Louis Judd, a psychiatrist, Jane Randolph as Alice Moore, Oliver's assistant, Jack Holt as "Commodore" C. R. Cooper, Oliver's boss, Alan Napier as "Doc" Carver, one of Oliver's co-workers (uncredited), Elizabeth Dunne as Mrs. Plunkett, the owner of the pet shop (uncredited). 

The Story

The Panther Cage. In the recreated Central Park Zoo, it's close. 

The real zoo was set up as depicted a wide walkway with outdoor cages on either side. The walkways in the real Central Park had a distinctive hexagonal pattern (below). I'm not sure if it was continued into the Zoo.

The trash cans were New York City Dept. of Sanitation wire mesh. I don't think they were the tree trunks depicted in the film. The walkway in the real zoo led into a central harbor seal exhibit with a large pool. Here in the film though it looks like the path stops at a wall. 

Simone Simon as Irena

Irena Dubrovna, Serbian emigrant is sketching the black panther pacing in his cage. She doesn't like her progress and crumples up her work. Spotting a trash can that looks like a log, she tosses the crumpled paper ball towards it. She misses and it rolls to the feet of Oliver Reed who is standing at a hot dog wagon.

Kent Smith as Oliver

It's sort of reused in the same way as a meet cute intro in The Postman Always Rings Twice, but with a tube of lipstick rolling to John Garfield's feet.  

Oliver picks the wad up sees Irena. He points to basically a no littering sign and tosses it into the trash. He liked what he saw so he heads over to meet her. She continues to sketch. They talk, when she is ready to leave Oliver helps her to pack up her artists equipment. One of her sketches slips out and we see it is a drawing of a panther being impaled by a sword. 

They start walking down a street, she tells Oliver her name and he asks if she is Russian. Irena replies Serbian. When Oliver asks her if she would like to go out for tea she tells him that this is where she lives and to Oliver's delight invites him up for tea.

In Irena's apartment, Oliver notices a statue of a medieval king with an upraised sword that has a cat impaled. Irena tells him its King John of Serbia who drove the Mamelukes out of Serbia. 

The cat represents the evil and witchcraft that the villagers descended into under the enslavement of  the Mamelukes. Those wisest and the most wicked that were not killed by St. John ran off into the mountains and turned into large cats. Cat People. It was in and around Irena's village, she tells Oliver, where the descendants of the Cat People now live. So the Myth goes. Oliver thinks its all just superstitions.

Later when Oliver surprises her with a kitten, the cat is frightened of her. When Irena and Oliver take the kitten back to the pet shop to exchange it for a canary all the animals in the shop freak out when Irena steps inside. Irena has to wait outside for Oliver to come out with the bird. 

Despite all this, Irena and Oliver fall in love and they get married. At their wedding reception a strange woman approaches Irena and calls her "my sister" in Serbian. 

"my sister"

Irena is still afraid to kiss Oliver and refuses to consummate their marriage until she is sure it will not harm Oliver. She tells Oliver that she believes that she is a descendant of those Cat people and will change into a panther if aroused. 

Oliver is patient but that only goes so far. After Irena tells him that the canary was frightened to death when she tried to touch it, and then tells him that she "had" to toss the dead bird to the black panther at the zoo, had to do it, almost as an offering, as a sacrifice. Oliver tells her that she has to go see a psychiatrist, a Dr. Louis Judd. 

Judd blames it on a childhood trauma. Her father was killed mysteriously in the forest and her mother was called a Cat Woman and blamed for it. 

Tom Conway as Dr. Louis Judd

So far so good, but it all goes Noirsville when, when Irena comes back to the apartment ands finds Oliver sitting on the couch with Alice Moore. Oliver asks her how it went with Dr. Judd and Irena becomes quite pissed off when she finds out that Oliver got Dr. Judd's name from Alice. Jealousy is not a good emotion for Cat Women. Alice complicates things even further when she tells Oliver that she loves him and then Irena finds him eating at a cafe' with Alice. lol.

Noirsville

 Jane Randolph as Alice Moore

Irena & Bastet

Everything hits on all cylinders. Direction, Cinematography, Acting, Music, and especially the Sound Design that elevates some excellent sequences into Classic Noir showpieces. Producer Val Lewton, Bravo!

The film effective recreates the neighborhood along the Central Park / Fifth Ave border section. Since Irena can hear the big cats roar from her apartment the likely area for her home would have been between 63rd and the 65th street park transverse road. The cafe where some of the story takes place probably on Madison Ave. 

Alice probably lived near Central Park West. That would be the only reason she'd walk along the 65th St. transverse road. When she catches the bus to escape Irena it's heading for 5th Ave in the opposite direction. The pool that Alice uses for swimming just might be at the WMCA on West 63rd Street. So it all fits geographically. 

One thing most New Yorkers would notice is how ridiculously big. the interior of the brownstone is. Oliver jokingly alludes to the interior of brownstones, but even this is too much. it's got a ridiculously large sound stage stairway to climb just to get to Irena's apartment which is huge. It's not remotely believable especially with the storyline we got of Irena being an immigrant from Serbia. We never see her doing anything but artwork, maybe they forgot to tell us she was a famous artist. lol

An easy 10/10.