Simone Simon as Irena Dubrovna in
Cat People (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1942)
She was marked with the curse of those who slink and mate and kill by night ...
The 1942 psychological and supernatural suspense - I wouldn't call it a horror movie - Cat People is the fascinating tale of a beautiful and mysterious fashion illustrator in New York; Serbian-born Irena Dubrovna (played by the kitten-faced - but said to be temperamental - French actress Simone Simon).
Crazy as it sounds to her new apple-pie loving husband and the creepy psychiatrist he persuades her to visit, Irena believes herself - rightly as it turns out - to be descended from an ancient race of ailuranthropes who shapeshift (or metamorphose) into panthers when emotionally (or sexually) aroused.
Her foreignness combined with her feline qualities make her doubly exotic and doubly attractive to those of us who identify as xenophiles and cat lovers, although she undoubtedly would make a problematic wife or girlfriend, unless one happens to have a fetishistic desire to be killed and possibly eaten by a wild animal (which I don't, but some people do).
Several critics have described Cat People as boring and Simone Simon's acting as poor. But, having recently rewatched the film on TV, I would challenge this. The film may not be sensational, unlike many contemporary films, but it has a subtle understanding of shadowplay and the sexual politics of the period.
Further, as far as I can see Miss Simon does a perfectly fine job in the role of Irena, one of the strangest characters in mid-20th century American cinema; a woman soothed by the sound of lions roaring and who finds the darkness friendly.
One only wishes that the character could have embraced her nature and acknowledged her kinship with the feline-looking woman (played by Elizabeth Russell) who addresses her in a Serbian restaurant on her wedding night as moja sestra.
And it might also have been satisfying to have seen Irena use her claws on Oliver, her patient but patronising (and ultimately unfaithful) husband (played by Kent Smith) and his co-worker-cum-mistress, Alice (Jane Randolph), as she does on the sleazy shrink (and sexual predator) Dr. Judd (Tom Conway) who, having dismissed her fears as irrational and infantile - and having threatened to have her locked up - attempts to seduce Irena, thus triggering the fatal transformation from woman to panther.
If things don't end well for Dr. Judd, then, sadly, things don't end well for Irena either and she too lies dead at the end of the film, thereby leaving the path clear for Oliver and Alice to marry and live happily ever after in a world no longer threatened by Irena's inhuman otherness [1].
Notes
[1] Actually, that wasn't quite the case: in The Curse of the Cat People (dir. Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise, 1944), Oliver and Alice (played once more by Kent Smith and Jane Randolph) are now married and have a six-year-old daughter, Amy (Ann Carter), an extremely introverted child with a predilection for fantasy, who befriends the ghost of her father's deceased first wife, Irena (again played by Simone Simon).
Although sharing some of the same cast and characters - and clearly marketed as a sequel by RKO studio executives hoping to cash in on the success of their 1942 release - The Curse of the Cat People has little relationship to Cat People. Interestingly, however, its critical reputation has grown over the years and it is now seen by some as an enchanting and complex study of child psychology disguised as a ghost story.
To watch the original trailer for Cat People, click here.
To read a related post from May 2017 on woman-as-animal (with reference to a picture of Naomi Campbell by David LaChapelle entitled Cat House), click here.
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