The Original Cat Person

This year will mark the 80th anniversary of the release of Cat People. I watched it again last night, I think it'd been five or six years since the previous time. It occurred to me it's kind of the opposite of Dracula, a story partly inspired by fears of sexually aggressive eastern Europeans. The main character of Cat People is a monstrous eastern European because she's afraid to have sex, even with her husband.

Every time I watch the movie, I wonder how anyone could see Irena as the villain, though. But people definitely did. I've watched it with people who accepted implicitly that she's a wicked monster. Sometimes I forget how easily so many people slip into expected perspectives.

For my money, Alice is the real villain. Oliver's an infuriating lunkhead and she exploits it. When he has the foolishness to tell Irena's rival about her fear of physical intimacy, Alice makes a significant choice of psychiatrist to recommend:

Didn't I suggest Dr. Judd? I met him on the Commodore's boat. The way he goes around kissing hands makes me want to spit cotton, but I guess he knows all there is to know about psychiatry.

She guesses. So all she actually knows about this psychiatrist she's recommending to treat a woman with a fear of sexual contact is that he's prone to inappropriate sexual contact.

Dr. Judd's the only character Irena actually kills, after he's kissed her without permission. Except, did she kill him? The character returns in Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim. Most people call this a continuity problem but maybe Judd just wasn't as dead as he looked.

In any case, the fact that many, maybe even most, people see Irena as the villain heightens the tragic comedy in scenes where Oliver, Alice, and Judd solemnly talk about what to do about Irena, after she's already made it clear to Oliver she doesn't like him discussing her private business with others. Honey, this is your song:

Cat People is currently available on HBOMax.

More on the Mad

The same day I saw Joker I also watched 1946's Bedlam, part of the legendary series of horror movies produced by Val Lewton. Far from the heights of Cat People or Isle of the Dead, Bedlam stars Boris Karloff as the master of London's infamous Bethelem Asylum, or Bedlam, and, honestly, it can only just barely be called a horror film, being much more of a simplistic political polemic. Dealing as it does with issues of mental illness and economic class disparity, it served as a fascinating companion viewing to Joker. The cinematography and production design of Bedlam is marvellously detailed and as evocatively gloomy as Lewton's previous films and Karloff gives a great performance but Joker offers the more complex take on the same issues.

The film centres on Lewton regular Anna Lee as Nell Bowen, a "protege" of a wealthy man named Mortimer (Billy House). It's hinted that she used to be a street performer and now Mortimer keeps her in his household and retinue for her entertaining wit--she denies several times the suggestion there's anything more to their relationship than that but I assumed they were having sex. Mortimer provides funding for Bedlam in exchange for Karloff's character, Sims, keeping his enemies under lock and key.

Sims gives Nell a tour of the asylum, explaining with sinister obsequiousness how the mad are really animals, applying analogous animals to several examples, from the pigs who wallow in their own filth, to the tiger (a violent man kept in a cage), and to the dove, as Sims calls one beautiful, expressionless, and mute young woman (Joan Newton). It's hinted as strongly as a 1946 movie can hint that Sims rapes her routinely.

The film is based on William Hogarth's wonderful "Rake's Progress" series of paintings and there are many nice details of mid-18th century England. There are street merchants advertising wares with improvised songs; the aristocrats at their lavish dinners are shown with the same decadent heedlessness of the cartoonish characters from Hogarth. Even the liberal Whig leader, John Wilkes (Leyland Hodgson), is shown laughing at one of these dinners though ultimately he proves to be a straight forwardly good character.

It's the simplicity of the film's argument that made Joker work so much better in comparison. When Nell is eventually locked up for trying to force reforms for the asylum, she finds each and every inmate is really a kind and decent person who wouldn't dream of hurting her. Even when Sims locks her in with the "tiger", the big fellow ends up being as gentle as a kitten. As though if just one of these people laid a hand on her it would invalidate the argument for reforms in mental healthcare. That's the genius of Joker--not every victim of injustice is a hero or a secretly upstanding citizen, though sometimes it's that injustice that exacerbates their problems.