TSPDT placing: #471
Directed by: Jacques Tourneur
Written by: DeWitt Bodeen
In Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Hollywood producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) brainstorms ideas for the latest B-movie horror project to fall into his lap. Unhappy with the feline costumes they'd been testing, he proposes not showing the titular "cat-men" at all: "And why? Because the dark has a life of its own. In the dark, all sorts of things come alive." Shields was obviously referencing Jacques Tourneur's Cat People (1942), the brainchild of legendary horror producer Val Lewton, who made B-movies so professionally-crafted that to call them B-movies would be to do them a disservice. My first Lewton film was The Seventh Victim (1943), a clash of superb cinematography and a ridiculous plot, but fortunately Cat People has a more palatable storyline – though, of course, you'll still have to suspend disbelief on the odd occasion. If this film is a triumph, then it's a triumph of atmosphere, with Nicholas Musuraca (one of film noir's most accomplished cinematographers) prolonging the intrigue and suspense through his masterful use of lighting and shadows.
When American Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) marries Serbian immigrant Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), he convinces himself that his wife's fear of intimacy is simply a remnant of her superstitious childhood. But Irena is adamant that she not consummate the marriage, for she fears that, due to a Satanic family curse, her sexual passion will force her into the form of a bloodthirsty panther. Irene constantly surrounds herself with feline imagery, is instinctively drawn to a captive zoo panther, and her fears swiftly become a psychological obsession that threaten to take her over. Oliver confides his concerns in attractive co-worker Alice Moore (Jane Randolph), who is biased by her love for him, and psychiatrist Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway, who oddly appeared in the same role in The Seventh Victim), who dismisses Irena's worries as mere insanity. The three supporting players give good performances, but Simone Simon is weak; she does display a certain exotic allure and a shy vulnerability, but her dialogue delivery is entirely unconvincing.
Val Lewton originally instructed Tourneur to completely avoid showing the elusive panther, but RKO demanded more money-shots. Even so, Irena's feline form is on screen only for a few shots, and never in plain view. The filmmakers evidently understood that seeing nothing was infinitely more frightening than seeing a trained animal, and so the unknown – a shadow that lurks cunningly in the shadows – is exploited for maximum thrills. Lewton's initial insistence on not showing the panther, maintaining ambiguity on Irena's mental state, suggests that he had in mind something more than a simple "monster picture." Is this panther that plagues a shy, married woman's mind representative of something within ourselves – of suppressed jealousy, aggression and lust? Sex and violence have often blended together in mythology. Mafdet, the Ancient Egyptian goddess of justice and execution, possessed the head of a lioness; she was later replaced by Bast, whose image then changed to represent fertility and motherhood. In the same way, Irena's marital lust is intrinsically linked with her aggression, and abstinence alone will only temporarily quell her desires.7/10
Currently my #8 film of 1942:
1) Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)
2) To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch)
3) This Gun for Hire (Frank Tuttle)
4) Holiday Inn (Mark Sandrich)
5) The Major and the Minor (Billy Wilder)
6) The Glass Key (Stuart Heisler)
7) The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles)
8) Cat People (Jacques Tourneur)
9) Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (John Rawlins)
2) To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch)
3) This Gun for Hire (Frank Tuttle)
4) Holiday Inn (Mark Sandrich)
5) The Major and the Minor (Billy Wilder)
6) The Glass Key (Stuart Heisler)
7) The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles)
8) Cat People (Jacques Tourneur)
9) Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (John Rawlins)
The picture opens with a peaceful street in Warsaw, Poland in 1939, where humble citizens are leisurely going about their business. Suddenly, everybody turns in shock, staring in disbelief at the person who has just sidled up to Mr. Maslowski's delicatessen window – could that possibly be Adolf Hitler? It turns out, however, that he is merely an actor engaged in a local theatre production, where famous performers Joseph and Maria Tura (Jack Benny and Carole Lombard) are staging a Nazi satire. On the eve of opening night, political forces prevent the play from being performed, but those sets and costumes certainly aren't going to go to waste. After Hitler's army marches into Poland without warning, throwing Warsaw into disarray, it falls to these actors to prevent the leakage of top-secret Allied documents to the Gestapo. To avoid execution, Joseph Tura must deliver the acting performance of his career, all the while keeping an eye on his wife, whom he suspects of being unfaithful with a handsome Polish pilot (Robert Stack).
The early years of the 1940s provided a unique assortment of Hollywood pictures, with war-time propaganda reaching its manipulative, patriotic climax. Most filmmakers responded to the current political climate with super-serious and often unconvincing drama, but a select few – including Charles Chaplin with The Great Dictator (1940) – decided to unveil the comedic side of war, often layered beneath the tragedy of conflict and persecution. To Be or Not to Be spends a few too many minutes on Robert Stack's comparatively uninteresting Allied spy, but, as soon as Jack Benny re-enters the equation, the farce kicks into full-gear. German-born Sig Ruman is hilarious as the bumbling Col. "Concentration Camp" Ehrhardt, and Billy Wilder obviously thought so highly of the performance that he cast the actor as the very-similar Sgt. Johann Schulz in Stalag 17. We always enjoy seeing our film heroes cleverly out-wit the foolish bad-guys, and when the bad-guys are none other than Adolf Hitler and his band of Nazis, victory is very sweet, indeed.
16th Academy Awards, 1943:
Ah, Casablanca. What other film can evoke such powerful feelings of nostalgia, can exemplify so completely the golden period of Hollywood film-making? The year was 1942, and the world found itself in the midst of the bloodiest conflict in modern history. Unlike anything our generation could possibly imagine, citizens were faced with an incredible uncertainty about their future. The Nazis marched across Europe, an astonishing, seemingly-unstoppable enemy, and the United States watched with bated breath from across the Atlantic. Most Hollywood productions responded to such ambiguity with fully-fledged, unabashed patriotism, and war-time filmmakers became obsessed with validating audiences' beliefs that the Allied forces would inevitably win out against Germany, and, indeed, many often concluded their pictures with unnecessary epilogues in which we've apparently already won. Such propaganda, while no doubt ensuring commercial success from war-weary cinema-goers, has regularly tarnished and outdated even the most otherwise-impressive contemporary WWII pictures, as the directors' willingness to simulate a happy ending strikes distinctly false from an era in which the overwhelming atmosphere was that of uncertainty and insecurity {see Billy Wilder's Five Graves to Cairo (1943)}.
When Casablanca was first conceived, the filmmakers apparently had little idea they were about to produce one of cinema's best-loved pictures. A prime example of the studio-bound exotica that was popular at the time, and obviously a war-time off-shoot of Howard Hawks' Colombian aviation adventure 
Perhaps another possible explanation for the film's unlikely legacy lies with the distinguished cast, borrowed from all over Europe. Humphrey Bogart, Dooley Wilson and Joy Page were the sole American "imports," and assorted supporting talents were plundered from the United Kingdom (Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet), Sweden (Ingrid Bergman), Austria (Paul Henreid), Hungary (Peter Lorre) and even Germany (Conrad Veidt, who fled the Nazi regime in 1933 after marrying a Jewish woman). Bogart, who had been typecast throughout the 1930s as a lowlife gangster, had been given the opportunity to show some humanity in Raoul Walsh' film noir High Sierra (1941), but it was Casablanca that proved his first genuinely romantic role, and, with several notable exceptions, the remainder of his acting career would comprise of similarly-noble yet flawed heroes. Bergman, despite having a rather passive role, was never more enchanting than as Ilsa Lund, and, photographed with a softening gauze filter and catch lights, positively sparkles with gentle compassion and sadness.
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