Cat Class: THE CAT CREATURE, CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE

Julie Newmar in the old BATMAN TV show: her lithe playful grace, her tender malevolence with her dopey underlings, her black spangly bodysuit and ease in her own long, languorous dancer's body; the way she'd climb up and dismount the boxes and thrones in her secret lair, stretching out, slowing down dance moves and yoga stretches into cat-style longwise stretches, using her Stooge-like cat creeps as balancing beams. I know I'm not alone in feeling my own unconscious / anima rouse itself from fitful hibernation, whenever she appeared. She had me. All of us. We'd always play fight after a Batman rerun, in the front yard, shouting "Pow" and comically falling over, afterwards.

When Julie Newmar was on, we'd fight for real, to prove our alpha mating potential, though we were but seven or eight.

Bast, the ancient Egyptian cat goddess, was invoked around playground pentagrams. To boys like me in the 70s, she was what Jacob the wolf boy from Twilight is to girls the same age today. That's why I "get" Twilight, because of Julie Newmar. Animal-human hybrids are a pop culture's 'safe' pre-adolescent sexual surrogates, i.e. the anima / animus. Long before the shaky parent runs from the room confident their role has been passably completed by some five minute rote 'sex talk', the TV smiles, rolls its eye and returns to regular cat channel. Cat Woman has covered all this before, without the messy biology of reproductive science or messy things like 'real' girls. We may not know the mystery behind that impassive mask, but that's why it's there. It's pagan idolatry at its best. 

As long as it's on, we don't have to worry about not liking what's underneath. Lord knows, we'll have enough of those dates in the early years of AOL.

Alas, Newmar's Catwoman fell down a well (see Kitty Kali) and left us all bereft. Other ladies took the role. But what cat can compare to luminous Newmar? Genres change, boys become men; men become wolves; graven images are smashed by heretics' hacking hammers; the beat goes on; and cats come back / the very next day. As Boris says in THE BLACK CAT (1934), "Cats do not die." So can we deny that the crazy old lady with the ton of cats is within us all?

Lately two film ambled forth (though hardly knew I saw them with new eyes), cat-related. Timeless, strange, evocative, ephemeral, mysterious, kind of goofy, and short. What can we do but cherish them, and never try to put them in little cardboard boxes? You heard me, Ollie, in CAT PEOPLE (1942).

THE CAT CREATURE

(TVM - 1974) Dir. Curtis Harrington

***

A strange necklace is stolen off of a mummy and everyone who handles the piece gets mauled to death by Bast, a mummy cat god woman returned to life (the necklace held her prisoner in the sarcophagus!) Written by Robert Bloch, Curtis Harrington's TV movie THE CAT CREATURE is pretty damned solid as far as 70s TV horror movies go--and there were a lot of them but no one did them better than Curtis Harrington, the Joe Dante of his era. Despite, or because of, its typical-of-the-time shallow depth, slow-amble cop show vibe, their general avoidance of anything like sex or gore, its low budget and clear reliance on commercial breaks for pacing (which makes their video and digital versions seem strangely incomplete, as if 'the good parts' are missing), it's a prime example, a classic of comfort food opiate reassurance, with great use of the low rent streets of Los Angeles making a great melancholy contrast with the atmospheric indoor occult furnishings; B-list character actors from past cult favorites evoke the bygone classics while doling out just enough scares and suspense to keep dad from changing the channel at the next commercial break.

A true fan of the classic horror era, Harrington single-handedly rescued James Whale's OLD DARK HOUSE (1932) from the edge of the lost film void and here he salvages the gloriously sinister Gale Sondergaard from the blacklist, giving her a job as owner of 'The Sorcerer's Shop', with ample room to flash her evil smile, dish out tarot fortunes (guess what card is drawn for the nosy archaeologist?) and generally carry on in great scenes of Mephistophelean relish and coded lesbian vibery. Harrington also gives us Kent Smith, finally getting his comeuppance for trying to keep a kitten in a box all day at work as the dopey architect in the original CAT PEOPLE. getting murdered while archiving the collection of an already murdered Egyptologist collector. Each time... a cat silhouette!

Investigating detective Marco (Stuart Whitman) realizes the murders center around a missing cat amulet; the trail leads to 'The Sorcerer's Shop," since Sondergaard used to deal in hot jewelry.  Marco recruits a local archaeologist Roger Edmonds (David Heddison) to help him ID the stolen amulet and together they tool around LA, talking to each other with their great gravelly TV male 70s smoker voices, searching the flop houses and antique shops in search of the amulet and/or recently flush winos. What a unique experience for professor Edmonds! Turned on by the mystery (Agatha Christie is his favorite author, he tells Marco) vibes with the shy cute new clerk at Sondergaard's store, 'Rena' (Meredith Baxter), little guessing the occult connection.

Jammed with great skulls, Satanic tapestries and assorted items much darker than you'll find in any new age bookshop today (with a great palette of golden oranges, browns, and blacks) Sondergaard's shop seems like one weird great place to hang out, as does Reina's apartment and the wickery restaurant.  John Carradine, Keye Luke, John Carradine, Milton Pearson (he played the escaped lunatic in THE HIDDEN HAND) and John Abbott (THE VAMPIRE'S GHOST) saunter past as the suspects, coroners, or new victims, as Marco and Roger keep orbiting back to Sondergaard's and cute Rena, I know this is hard to believe, lieutenant, but the murders seem to have been done by a cat! And then Roger brings up the subject of Bast-- the cat goddess worshipped through human sacrifice by ancient Egyptians. And all the victims were drained of blood!

So much more than just a restaurant - dig the weird waiter and art direction

I love the little weird details here: the skulls and weird old Universal horror props in every corner of the frame; the meowing violins, pensive percussion, slow sustains and yowling gongs in Leonard Rosenman's score; the cool-creepy green font of the credits: the eerie chanting of the exit music. At a brisk 75 minutes it's over quite promptly, leaving me, at least, wanting more, rather than less, which is a rare good feeling to have with a 60s-70s TVM. From the plaster Egyptian 'artifacts' to the autumnal palette, Harrington ensures every frame is a-drip with classic horror fan / 70s childhood manna (it's streaming through Shudder). Adding a manly contrast, I like too the teaming of Heddison and Whitman, each with a voice deeper than the other, displaying a manly gravitas long vanished, sadly, from our post-MTV landscape.

Dig some of Harrington's 'uncanny' extras - the lesbians at the Sorcerer's shop,
waiter at the hippie-ish restaruant, "Maybelle" at the hotel, etc.

Best of all is the way the odd sense of isolation, the superb contrast of run-down LA studio backstreets and Addams Family / Christine McConnell-style posh interiors finds a doomed resolution in the sadness in Baxter's Rena. When she tells Roger of her centuries being alone in the dark, getting closer and closer to him in a romantic heat blast, you feel just how tempted he must be to take her up on her offer and just go racing out of town. Masterfully underplaying as she goes, she conjures a grown-up Amy from CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (perhaps intentionally), history all set to repeat itself (Rena being clearly taken from 'Irina'). Taking a page perhaps from Lewton, Harrington ably syncs the mellow rhythm of 70s TV to the languid sense of timeless affection that develops between Rena and Marco--evoking that SHE/MUMMY ages-echoing amor. The "did they or didn't they" question is sidestepped in such an ephemeral yet profound way (we feel how a casual coffee after work can evolve into a devotion beyond death without so much as a romantic kiss; the affection is there in their mellow loving unconsciously tactile manner with each other the morning after). It's the same sweetly aching connection we get in Harrington's NIGHT TIDE, that ephemeral mythopoetic love we find only in dreams, they dissolves into air and surf if you try and hold onto them past waking. Alas, the climax, with its surplus of cats and Rena... well, I can't spoil it but the ending tosses less-is-more ideals to the wind, replete with ceremonial Egyptian garb, skulls, dust, and massive cat attack. As so often happened with prime time TV movies, despite the cool font and chanting-Morocco-style desert wind fade out, it might end better if you go upstairs before the last five minutes and watch safely from the embryonic depths.  

CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE

(1944) Dir. Robert Wise

***1/2

Just as CAT CREATURE's low-key success hinges on hazy classic B-movie nostalgia, CURSE's success hinges on the Lewton's unique wartime quietude and visual poetry, his gift with extended dialogue-free scenes of young girls making their way through a strange landscapes at night, menaced by the quiet and sudden rush of trains, zombies, busses or snow tires, the whistle of the cane stalks in the dry wind the shadows in the pool room, and so on. Each is, in its way, a transient event, ephemeral; the supernatural is always ready to dissolve in the salty brine of rational overhead lighting.

CURSE goes Lewton's bucking of the RKO brass-mandate of the title one better, to eke out a weird but quietly beguiling fable that snakes through THE SECRET GARDEN and NIGHT OF THE HUNTER-style child's eye mythopoetica, building to a weird climax of faith and wind effects. It also has a cast of way more women than men (the war was in full stride) but unlike so many woman-dominated films of the era, there are no types, no floozies and caricatures, just low-key confident professionals, including a cool teacher whose authority on child psychology is delivered in the same calm-assertive manner of Nancy Davis in the Lewton-esque SHADOW ON THE WALL (and sadly almost nowhere else).

Though it's often avoided in principle by classic horror fans (there's no actual cat people, too many kids), there's much more to this sequel than the casual viewer of the first ten minutes will suspect. The story is unique among sequels in that is very faithful to its predecessor as far as cast and continuation, but rather than repeat the same formula, as RKO no doubt hoped (i.e. some young girl coming of age ignorant of her cat-like ways, headed to a bloodier honeymoon than the censors can imagine), Lewton could cite Irina's sexual hysteria in the previous film made a literal child impossible, so his weird 'imaginary friend' thing would have to work.

Irina dreams in CAT PEOPLE (1942)

Kent Smith (remember him from the above movie, CAT CREATURE?) is once again loping around as Ollie, the amiable but hopelessly square ship builder whose patience drove his late wife--the coded lesbian/feline Serbian Irina (Simone Simon)--to murder. Naturally he's remarried, to Alice (Jane Randolph), the girl who Irina tried to kill in the first film, and it's their kid who's haunted by the ghost of Irina, but it's a good haunting. Irina has found peace in death, and the family has moved to the bucolic paradise of Sleepy Hollow --only Kent is having trouble moving on, terrified that somehow Irina's toxic imagination will leak out and poison his daughter. Maybe he's right to be worried: a only child more like Irina than Alice, Amy (Ann Carter) doesn't mix well with the other kids, preferring to follow butterflies down ominous driveways. Both Alice and Ollie still work at the ship building company, so Amy is minded by Sir Lancelot (the calypso singer from the previous year's I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE) as a combination maid, cook, chauffeur and nanny. Their normal happy upscale middle-class life includes: bridge games with the neighbors, drop-in visits from the teachers, and drinks and songs with the Xmas carolers. The compassion is clear in Lewton's and screenwriter Dewitt Bodeen's treatment of their romantic evolution and the innate goodness (and educated intelligence) of Sleepy Hollow life. That psychic and inward daughter Amy doesn't quite fit Ollie's uber-generic idea of what kids should be however, turns Ollie into the bad guy. Lashing out at any sign of shadowy imagination (he's still determined to believe Irina's condition was all in her head) he's all but inhaled his own ghost, that of some long gone witch-hunting Puritan.

One of the real issues I have with Lewton, especially his later work, is something Tourneur would have probably kept more ambiguous, the line between fantasy and reality. The first two films of Lewton keep the door to the unknown open: voodoo and this ancient Serbian curse could be real and not just vivid imagination. A big 'if' kept them from spilling over into straight-out fantasy or the tired 'it was all a trick' ending that makes horror fans groan (the sign the producer really doesn't like the genre he's assigned). When Irina's ghost shows up to help Amy in her loneliness, we may read it as a kind of psychic apology (since Ollie's irrational fury towards Amy's flights of imagination are due to Irina's 'madness') or just take her presence at face value - that Amy saw a picture of Irina in a book and thought she was pretty, and Ollie blowing up at her for showing it to him gives it a kind of holy cachet.

Either way, if she's just 'an imaginary friend' it kind of errs on the side of whimsy, a whimsy that' compels Ollie himself to become Irina's shadow. When he spanks Amy for saying she has an imaginary friend, we hate him so much it's hard not to cheer her for running off into the night, utterly abandoned as even her imaginary friend decides to leave her (since she broke the cardinal rule and mentioned her existence to dogmatic Ollie).

We relate to Amy's desolation the same way we related to Irina's frigidity in CAT PEOPLE. Whether or not she was coded closeted-even-to-herself lesbian (as per the 'sister' greeting of Elizabeth Russell at the cozy restaurant), Irina's dislike of being touched (pawed, mauled) made her cinematically self-aware - we related, since Kent Smith so ably played a kind of neutered version of the American male it was easy to see how she might presume marriage would be lavender in nature. Since the code is in effect, on a meta scale, it was also as If Irina knew that the only thing keeping herself human was the safety of the camera, our gaze. In director Jacques Tourneur's simple but elegant daytime (studio-bound) shots of her apartment, the restaurant, and the zoo, she was immortal - give her the black night and sooner or later, there'd be no escape from the pawing of the Ollie.

As per the code, it's inside the fade-out when sex happens-- the demons take possession; the animated cats dance in her head. We kids knew this as kids, from being brave all day in the sun with our parents around, and then huddling in bed at night, aware of every little scratching noise inside the walls. Imagination is--in the land of children and Lewton--not merely some Spielbergian whimsy, but also a source of unfathomable danger and dread. Irina's fear of sex was like our fear of the dark, a ruptured vein of mythic alchemy.

And since we didn't understand it, sex became an important mystery initiation, a ritual, notable for its subtextual absence (it's the thing we don't see - at least in older movies - it's what happens in the place no children or cameras can trespass. We only knew that people emerge from this place changed - bonds are somehow stronger in the morning or after a cut to the fireplace or a tower, or the train going through a tunnel). The darkened portion of human knowledge, all the things we kids were afraid to find out but were nonetheless drawn to like a magnet, lay behind the wedding veil, in the dark of the dissolve.

The Women: reflecting the wartime shortage of men by having a strong mostly female cast,
where everyone, even Amy, is more or less a mature adult.
As in SHADOW ON THE WALL, the world of disturbed children is one where
women carry absolute authority. Amy's teacher, Ms. Callahan (Eve March), even corrects
Ollie's intolerant behavior towards his daughter; Ollie sends Amy upstairs
but he's the brat; Ms. Callahan sends Ollie up after her, but far more maturely.

Either way, Amy herself is the product of piercing that veil; the evidence of Ollie finally getting laid. But he doesn't get to control the outcome any more than Irina could control her cat conversion. Amy is dreamy and otherworldly, not at all the rational bundle of joy Ollie was blithely expecting all those patient weeks with Irina. Ignoring her friends to chase butterflies, mailing her birthday invitations to magic trees, and calling Irina into being; she also goes chasing butterflies and walking past the gloomy old 'haunted house.' Here Amy show her connection to the mystic. She is not afraid; an old lady in the window throws her a magic ring wrapped in a kerchief and soon Amy finds herself swept into the drama inside the crumbling Gothic mansion, between super-creepy Elizabeth Russell (the 'sister' in the first film), whose elderly mom, who an old stage actress (Julia Dean) refuses to recognize as her own daughter (not unlike Ollie and Amy might devolve into if they're not careful).

These visits are fascinating, Amy offering completion of a kind of maternal love triangle that is almost exactly like the one Hitchcock would later depict in MARNIE and one is compelled to realize the rarity of it since these are the only two instances (though it shows up on a more sexual note in, say, Von Sternberg's Dietrich films) as the old woman pampers Amy almost intentionally to drive Russell into a jealous sulk.

On the other hand, why is this weird daughter hanging around, taking care of her mom and not, seemingly, having a life of her own?

Ann Carter is a very unique actress, with something of Veronica Lake's blonde otherworldliness (she even plays Lake's daughter in the last scene of I MARRIED A WITCH). She bring to Amy a heightened cinematic reality: any fantasy or paranoid hallucination is just as real and vivid as the reality itself - and for the film to work properly we must take them as literal. If we do, one of the scarier parts of the film is one level just an old lady telling the tale of the Headless Horseman. It's the way it's filmed that makes it so eerie: Dean's commitment to the role, the wide-eyed way she stares directly into the camera while delivering the oration (and we hear, through Amy's mind presumably, the thunder of approaching hoofbeats) creates a uniquely weird and original mood that won't be duplicated again until the big climax.

Though there's no immanent threat, and it's the afternoon, and Edward (Sir Lancelot) is right there to whisk her away, the mood--one imaginative woman's mind to another's--lingers. Sir Lancelot's discomfort can't compete with that kind of wild imaginative prowess, so he fears it. For Lewton fans it's an ironic counterpoint: the last time we saw Lancelot in a Lewton film he was slowly advancing towards Frances Dee in I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (below, 2nd down), singing a creepy ballad about the 'trouble' at the plantation, staring into the camera in the same way. Now, a year later, he's shifting with the same unease he generated in Dee; and he's sort of playing the Dee role here, a caregiver to a blonde with far-away eyes - just a touched and wayward girl instead of a zombie.

Don't stare into the camera, lest the camera stare back

Directed with some of Tourneur's visual poetry by Robert Wise, once we leave the daytime shots for the surreal studio snowdrifts and spooky mansion with its rattling shudders and wind billowing through the curtained foyer, flickering the oil lamps, the film finally lets go of its central theme of childhood imagination to focus on something closer to spiritual transubstantiation. We come away wondering if Amy's found a new friend, a babysitter, or at least a friendlier (or at the very least, marginally less hostile) neighbor in Elizabeth Russell. And dad comes around too - at last at which point Irina can safely disappear into the idyll. THE END flashes in an ominous touch, just as it does in Curtis Harrington's CAT CREATURE, without a specific orchestral crescendo, implying the story is still going on, even after the house lights come up. It might be over for us, the 'End' and heavenly 'Exit' calling us forth from our air-conditioned tomb, but cats do not die, nor does darkness.

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