Cat People (1982) revisited

If you want to properly appreciate Paul Schrader’s 1982 Cat People you have to avoid thinking of it as a remake of the 1942 Cat People. It is not a remake. Schrader took the basic idea of the 1942 film and used it to make an entirely different movie. Simply remaking a movie is a pointless exercise and it’s even more pointless in the case of a masterpiece like the 1942 Cat People. Schrader understood this.

Taking the premise of an earlier movie and doing something radically different with it, as Schrader did, can however be very worthwhile. It can result in a new movie that is in its own way just as interesting and just as good as the earlier film. The 1982 Cat People falls into this category. If you approach it determined to accept it on its own terms then you’re in for a wild and exciting cinematic ride.

Incidentally with the benefit of hindsight Schrader believed that he should have changed the title.

Irena Gallier (Nastassja Kinski) arrives in New Orleans to be reunited with her brother Paul (Malcolm McDowell) whom she hasn’t since since she was four. They are orphans. Their parents had been circus folk.

Almost as soon as she arrives Paul disappears. We know that in fact he is still around. He is in a cage in the zoo. He is now a leopard.

Irena has encountered a nice young man named Oliver (John Heard) who is a curator at the New Orleans Zoo. He gets her a job there. There is an immediate strong attraction between Irena and Oliver.

Irena doesn’t know that the zoo’s new black leopard is Paul but she senses something strange about the animal, something that fascinates her.

Irena gradually learns the truth, that she and Paul are not wholly human. They are like lycanthropes, but they transform into leopards. That truth about her nature will have consequences for her relationship with Oliver. And then bodies start to accumulate. Irena can’t believe that Paul could be responsible although the evidence seems to point that way.

Irena is a virgin and that’s significant. There’s a reason she is afraid to have sex with a man, and she slowly figures out what that reason is.

The movie invents its own cat people mythology, or cat people lore. Irena and Paul are cat people, as were their parents. They can only safely have sex with their own kind, in other words with each other. If they have sex with outsiders they transform into leopards. They then must kill. When they have killed they revert to their human form.

Paul knows all this, which is why he exhibits such an obvious sexual interest in Irena. This horrifies Irena. She does not want to accept the truth about herself and she does not want to accept the consequences to which that truth will lead.

Oliver has a bit of an obsession with Dante and sees Irena as Beatrice, which adds another wrinkle to the movie.

The ending of Alan Ormsby’s screenplay did not satisfy Schrader. He came up with his own very different ending, which was what was filmed. Schrader was correct. His ending is vastly superior, and it’s a truly great ending.

Schrader was heavily influenced by European film-making of the 1960s and Cat People is an American film set in America but with a definite European sensibility. He liked New Orleans as a setting because he considered it to be the least American of all American settings. He also wanted Nastassja Kinski (she was his first choice for the rôle) because she looked European. It works. It gives the movie a mysterious exotic quality, as if it takes place in a slightly different reality.

Immense thought and effort and imagination were put into the visuals of this movie and the effort paid off. It has its own distinctive unsettling mysterious look. It really is visually superb.

And it was all done in the old school way. These were the pre-CGI days. This film uses matte paintings and in-the-camera optical effects and coloured gels and makeup and the end result is stunning.

Malcolm McDowell is terrific. This was the kind of outrageous off-the-wall kind of rôle at which he excelled. He’s scary and creepy and strange.

But Nastassja Kinski is even better. This is her movie and she gives her career-best performance. She’s sexy in a weird exotic unsettling way, she conveys Irena’s confusion and anguish very effectively and she manages to seem subtly cat-like. Her performance is all the more impressive when you remember that she was just twenty when this movie was made.

Schrader’s Cat People is in its own way just as good as the ’42 movie. An erotic horror movie, with the emphasis on the erotic. Very highly recommended.

The DVD includes a very enlightening audio commentary by the director plus some other worthwhile extras.