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Cat People (Currently only available on disc with The Curse of the Cat People)


"Cat People is constructed almost entirely out of fear. There wasn't a budget for much of anything else. It exists on eight or nine sets, the running time is only 73 minutes, it has few special effects, there are no major stars, the violence is implied or dreaded but not much seen. Yet the film, made as a B picture for only $135,000, became RKO's top grosser for 1942, bringing in $4 million, compared to the studio's 'Citizen Kane' at $500,000 in 1941. It renewed the careers of its producer Val Lewton, its director Jacques Tourneur and its star, the French actress Simone Simon; it inspired 10 more macabre titles from Lewton's production unit and was copied all over Hollywood -- because it was scary, and because it was cheap. What was hard to copy was its artistry."

"As a group, the films that Val Lewton produced in the 1940s are a landmark in American movie history. Born in the Ukraine, raised in Berlin, a newspaperman and pulp writer, he was a story editor for David O. Selznick before starting his own unit at RKO. Lewton (1904-1951) worked with directors who became important (Tourneur, Mark Robson, Robert Wise), but the films were and still are identified as his; I remember the French director Bertrand Tavernier and the American critic Manny Farber at the 1990 Telluride festival, talking about how unusual it was for a producer, not a director, to be the ruling auteur of a group of films."

"Tourneur may have found his overall approach by happenstance in 'Cat People,' which began as a title without a story and developed its minimalist style as a result of the low budget. But he and Tourneur had found a note that worked, and in various ways he found it again in such films as 'I Walked with a Zombie' (1943), 'The Leopard Man' (1943), 'The Curse of the Cat People' (1944) and 'The Body Snatcher' (1945). He made "movies that are often more like symbolist poems or obscure fetishistic rituals,' wrote Geoffrey O'Brien in the New York Review of Books. 'They are not so much frightening as unnervingly strange and shot through with a palpable melancholy.'" ------ Roger Ebert

"Cat People" Selected for the Library of Congress National Film Registry of American Film.

DVD

  • Audio Commentary - by Greg Mank with Simone Simonn
  • Closed-captioned, Subtitled.

Curator's Comments:
Read Roger Ebert's essay on this DVD Classic.

Director: Jacques Tourneur
Black & White
73 minutes/70 minutes = total 143 minutes for both films
Released: 1942
Rated: NR

Country: U.S.A.
Language: English
Genre: Drama, Horror, Romance, Thriller

 

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