Legendary producer Val Lewton's first horror vehicle for RKO, "Cat People" is one of those movies that generally excite critics and film professors more than fans. It's beyond question that "Cat People" occupies an important position in horror cinema history, and students of film should make a point of seeing it...but it's a tough slog. The scenes of implied horror are beautifully executed (and you can see their lingering influence even in more explicit genre films like Terence Fisher's "The Curse of the Werewolf"), but the long passages of dialogue that separate them are tedious and occasionally painful. Neither Simone Simon nor Kent Smith had sufficient screen presence to give the film any weight, and the exquisite tension that characterizes subsequent Lewton productions like "Isle of the Dead" (my personal favorite) and "The Body Snatcher" (his best) is absent here. "Cat People" is an interesting mood piece, but the mood is a little *too* restrained and self-consciously set. Lewton hadn't quite yet mastered his craft.
Review of Cat People
