Cat People (Currently only available on disc with The Curse of the Cat People)
"As a group, the films that Val Lewton produced in the 1940s are a landmark in American movie history. Born in the Ukraine, raised in Berlin, a newspaperman and pulp writer, he was a story editor for David O. Selznick before starting his own unit at RKO. Lewton (1904-1951) worked with directors who became important (Tourneur, Mark Robson, Robert Wise), but the films were and still are identified as his; I remember the French director Bertrand Tavernier and the American critic Manny Farber at the 1990 Telluride festival, talking about how unusual it was for a producer, not a director, to be the ruling auteur of a group of films." "Tourneur may have found his overall approach by happenstance in 'Cat People,' which began as a title without a story and developed its minimalist style as a result of the low budget. But he and Tourneur had found a note that worked, and in various ways he found it again in such films as 'I Walked with a Zombie' (1943), 'The Leopard Man' (1943), 'The Curse of the Cat People' (1944) and 'The Body Snatcher' (1945). He made "movies that are often more like symbolist poems or obscure fetishistic rituals,' wrote Geoffrey O'Brien in the New York Review of Books. 'They are not so much frightening as unnervingly strange and shot through with a palpable melancholy.'" ------ Roger Ebert "Cat People" Selected for the Library of Congress National Film Registry of American Film. DVD
Curator's Comments: Read Roger Ebert's essay on this DVD Classic. Director: Jacques Tourneur Country: U.S.A.
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