VAL LEWTON AND CAT PEOPLE (1942)

Films are often classified by genre – although there are those who deny the idea of genre and say each films is its own thing. None the less as we have seen, films classified as being in the same genre tend to share certain characteristics of plot, imagery, set pieces and so on.

Some genres are classified by the emotion they try to produce: tragedy, drama, melodrama, comedy, horror and so on. Others are based on content: crime, westerns, science fiction, action/adventure, fantasy and the like. There are sub genres (mystery as a subgenre of crime) and mixed genres and debatable genres like film noir which is sometimes seen as a style rather than a genre.

There are also ways of classifying films in film studies. One of these is by the nation or culture producing the film. You can find courses like German Cinema, British cinema, Japanese cinema and so forth. While not all the films from a given culture share characteristics, the idea that there is something which allows people to recognize a film as being from that specific culture or county. There is a general statement which one encounters which says “If you want action, see an American film; for character development see a European film and for mood or atmosphere see a Japanese film.” Technically speaking for many purposes, a film is classed as coming from the culture that funded it.

Another approach is to look at films by specific directors. Colleges may give courses called something like “Directors Cinema” and offer each semester a different director or set of directors: The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, the Films of Stanley Kubrick; the Films of Otto Preminger etc. This approach tries to find something in the body of data that makes a film recognizable as being made by a specific director.

Yet another approach is to look at the films of a specific production studio. MGM, Fox, RKO, Univeral and so on. Fox was known for its gritty social dramas, MGM for musicals and Universal for its horror films. Again, there a bound to be exceptions. One would be hard put to find someone who would recognize Freaks as an MGM film.

It is rare that a producer has their own stamp on the film, but Val Lewton is a case where this happens. Val Lewton was born in 1904 in Yalta in the Russian Empire, now the Ukraine. At 2 years of age, his family moved to Berlin and the in 1909 to the US where he lived in Port Chester, NY. He was the nephew of the silent screen actress, Alla Nazimova. He was not well, suffered from a fear of cats and died at 46 in 1951. Lewton was also a writer and published books and worked as a newspaper reporter.

He was teamed in 1942 with Jacques Tourneur to run a B level unit making low budget horror films to compete with Universal’s famous horror films (Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf Man etc.) Touneur was born in Paris in 1904 to film maker (director/producer) Maurice Tourneur . Jacques worked with hia father in NY and France before setting off on his own.

Lewton was not a fan of the horror genre as it was done by Universal. He felt the films were basically set up to deal with special effects and gruesome make-up. Lewton was more interested in what he called “Terror films”. These were films that had much great psychological tension. Typically Lewton was given a title and told to make a film with that title. The first three films produced by the duo are Cat People 1942 (remade 1982) (DeWitt Bodeen – 7th Victim , Curse of the Cat People) I Walked with a Zombie 1943 (Curt Siodmak) ) and Leopard Man 1943 (Cornell Woolrich a famous mystery writer – Rear Window) After that RKO wanted to move the pair to A level films but Lewton was not happy with big budgets. His creativity seems to have come out with B level low budget films in which he would happily slip around the studio using things from other films to make his films have a real “quality” look about them that would not have been possible with his budget. (Cat People cost about $134,000. and made about $4,000,000 in the US.) The film was very popular although the critics did not review it well. It played so long in the theaters because of its popularity that some reviewers went to see it again and repudiated their earlier reviews recognizing the worth of the film.

In 1945 Lewton was offered Boris Karloff for a film. Lewton was very upset because he felt Karloff had an affinity for the Universal films which Lewton didn’t like. After a meeting with Karloff, in which Karloff expressed his disgust with the Universal films horror ideas, Lewton reaslized they were on “the same wavelength” The Body Snatcher is probably one of the best films either of them had made.

Tourneur went on to direct the famous noir film Out of the Past, Flame and the Arrow, Experiment Perilous, Berlin Express and a salute to Lewton called Curse/Night of the Demon. After the separation from Tourneur, he went on to make

Robert Wise went on to do The Set-up, Day the Earth Stood Still, Somebody Up there Likes Me, Run Silent Run Deep, I Want to Live, Odds Against Tomorrow, West Side Story, The Haunting, Sound of Music, Sand Pebbles, Star!, Andromeda Strain, Hindenburg, Audrey Rose, Sound of Music Lewton had an enormous impact on his films which seems to have effected his directors. Tourneur’s Curse/Night of the Demon, and Wise’s The Haunting are salutes to Lewton.

For information on The Cat People click here