SOURCE: "Val Lewton's Cat People," in Cinefantastique, Vol. 12, No. 4, May-June, 1982, pp. 23-7.

[In the following essay, Turner describes the production history of Cat People.]

The great days of the horror film had become wistful memories. By the early '40s only an occasional worth-while chiller emerged from the morass the genre had become. And these few films served only to keep alive the hope that a successor to James Whale and Tod Browning would herald a rebirth.

Finally, a new master of horror did appear. A man who opened new directions for the horror genre by purposely going against the established grain, throwing out the old, stale conventions, and producing something new. From producer Vladimar (Val) Lewton's first picture, Cat People, he started a small renaissance that breathed new life into the stagnant pond that horror films had become, bringing with him a cadre of talented men whose influence went far beyond the atmospheric horror films made at RKO.

Of course, in the film industry renaissance doesn't happen because of artistic need, but because of money. And Lewton's horror unit was born as a consequence of the periodic management shakeups at RKO. Such upheavals were due to the failure of expensive productions to make money for the studio.

Charles Koerner, a former theater executive, was appointed production vice-president early in 1942. A glance at the ledger sheets convinced Koerner that the company was losing money on many of its high budget features, but making healthy profits on the so-called "B" pictures—those made on budgets below $150,000. He also noted that a rival studio, Universal, was making so much money from horror pictures that the front office referred to them as "Midas productions." Koerner decided to establish a new production unit which would specialize in the making of low-budget horror films built around exploitable titles that could be audience tested in advance.

At a Beverly Hills dinner party, Koerner met Lewton, a Russian-born novelist and publicity writer who was a story editor and research director for David O. Selznick and had been for the past eight years. Burly and good humored, a natural raconteur, Newton impressed the studio chief as a man who could put together a good show. Following his instincts, Koerner offered Lewton a job as horror specialist and Lewton accepted.

In March, 1942, Lewton went on the RKO payroll at $250 per week. He delighted in informing his friends that he was listed on the studio roster as an "ass. prod." His immediate superior was executive producer, Lou Ostrow.

At first Koerner and Lewton worked on adapting published literary works and looked at Algernon Blackwood's Ancient Sorceries. Lewton was impressed with Koerner's taste, but later he revised his opinion. Koerner had been to a party and someone there suggested that werewolves and vampires had been overdone in films, but "nobody had done much of anything about cats." Abandoning the Blackwood tale, Koerner came up with a title: Cat People. Lewton found the title depressingly lurid, but kept his opinion to himself.

Finding an acceptable work to fit the title was not as easy as thinking up the name. Lewton spent months looking at stories including Ambrose Bierce's The Eyes of the Panther and Margaret Irwin's Monsieur Seeks A Wife, which he noted down as "a fetching little tale about a man who meets two sisters that are not really women, but cats." Finally, Lewton dropped all pretense of adapting a published literary work and roughly outlined an idea of his own.

This embryonic version opens in a snow-covered Balkan village being invaded by a Nazi Panzer division. By day the inhabitants seem somnolent and unconcerned by such a threat; by night, however, these same individuals change into great cats and turn against their captors. A girl from this village flees to New York and falls in love, but she can't escape her heritage.

Lewton initially planned for the girl never to speak directly. "I thought we might let our cat-girl only speak in long shots," he said. "You hear the murmur of her voice, you never hear what she is saying and, if it is necessary to give her words meaning to the audience, I think we can always contrive to have some other character tell what the girl said." This idea was not popular with the decision-makers.

Also, the projected ending was quite unlike the one eventually filmed. "Most of the cat/werewolf stories I have read and all the werewolf stories I have seen on the screen end with the beast gunshot and turning back into a human being after death," Lewton wrote. "In this story I'd like to reverse this process. For the final scene I'd like to show a violent quarrel between the man and woman in which she is provoked into an assault upon him. To protect himself, he pushes her away, she stumbles, falls awkwardly, and breaks her neck in the fall. The young man, horrified, kneels to see if he can feel her heart beat. Under his hand black hair and hide come up and he draws back to look down in horror at a dead, black panther."

While many of these initial ideas didn't survive, important elements of the final version were suggested. Lewton wrote that he wanted "a man, possibly a doctor, who always gives the scientific or factual explanation for any phenomena that occurs, brushing the supernatural aside, and yet, who is always proved wrong by the events on the screen. This device, I hope, will express the audiences' doubts even before they are fully formulated in their minds and quickly answer them, thus lending a degree of credibility to the yarn, which is going to be difficult to achieve."

Another idea envisioned early in the production and later seen on the screen, was the scene in which Oliver takes Irena (Simone Simon) into a pet store. "Here," wrote Lewton, "I'd like to show the chattering fear that arises upon her entrance. At the very height of the uproar, I would like to have a little black cat come down the center aisle of the store, very calmly, and rub affectionately against the girl." (In the film, the cat is as frightened as the other animals.)

Lewton's desire to avoid typical horror film situations led him to drop the Balkan sequence entirely, opting instead to present the entire story in the context of modern, workaday settings. As he stated in a studio press release in 1944, "the characters in the run-of-the-mill weird films were usually people very remote from the audiences' experiences. European nobles of dark antecedents, mad scientists, man-created monsters, and the like cavorted across the screen. It would be much more entertaining if people with whom audiences could identify were shown in contact with the strange, the weird and the occult. We made it a basic part of our work to show normal people—engaged in normal occupations—in our pictures."

Ostrow, Lewton's direct superior, was not particularly sympathetic to Lewton's ideas of cinema. He gauged Lewton as too pretentious and fussy to succeed as a producer of popular entertainment—a view shared by many others at the studio. Fortunately, Koerner liked most of the ideas and only his intervention saved Cat People from being reshaped along conventional lines.

As soon as the basic story idea was given a reluctant goahead by Ostrow, Lewton sent for DeWitt Bodeen, a playwright working as a research assistant at Selznick-International, who became the first screenwriter of the group. "Before Val departed for RKO," said Bodeen, "he asked me to call him as soon as my work for Selznick was completed. I phoned him two weeks later and he made arrangements for me to be hired as a contract writer at the Guild minimum of $75 per week. I had never written for the screen before."

Bodeen, now 74, lives in Woodland Hills, and is the only member of the Lewton team credited on Universal's new Cat People remake, for the original story. Universal sent Bodeen a copy of the new script. "It follows the original fairly closely as to the incidents," he said, "but of course it is very modern and very, very sexy. I didn't really like that part, but I'm glad they gave me a credit, and I plan to see it."

For a week, Lewton and Bodeen read all the literature about cats they could unearth. They also screened numerous successful horror films, mostly made by Universal, with the idea of eliminating as many cliches of the genre as possible. At last Lewton turned his notes over to Bodeen and had him construct a 50-page story, not in treatment or script form, but one written as though for publication in a magazine.

Bodeen produced a first-person narrative written from the point of view of Alice, a woman in love with the cat girl's husband. He brought many important elements to the basic story, including what proved to be an outstanding sequence wherein Alice is menaced by a shadowy, cat-like presence in a hotel swimming pool. The idea sprang from a personal experience: Bodeen had almost drowned once when swimming alone.

Jacques Tourneur, son of the great French director, Maurice Tourneur, was hired by RKO at Lewton's instigation. After working in France and America on various features and short subjects, he met Lewton while both worked on staging the French Revolution sequences for the Selznick MGM epic, A Tale of Two Cities (1935). By 1942, Tourneur's career was stagnant and he was only too happy to join Lewton's horror unit.

The next member of the team was film editor Mark Robson. Robson was one of the studio's top editors, not the sort generally relegated to B productions but, as he explained: "I was Orson Welles' editor on Citizen Kane, and that picture cost a lot of time and money it didn't recoup. Management tended to blame all of RKO's financial troubles on Orson, and those of us who worked with him had to share the blame."

Being exiled to the horror unit proved a good break for Robson, however. He was brought into all pre-production and story sessions from the first and made important contributions. He also had experience as a second unit director, which proved an asset. As the production neared realization, Lewton wrote to Koerner that "If I were asked to name one single factor, beyond the director's work, which helped me most with Cat People, I would name Mark's work. Jacques says of him that he cuts like a director, which, from a director, is praise indeed."

The neophyte producer received valuable help from a fellow "B" movie producer, Herman Schlom, who was one of RKO's leading experts in making slick, economical melodramas. Schlom explained to Lewton the many ways of cutting preproduction costs, particularly in the planning of sets.

The government had imposed a strictly enforced wartime limit of $10,000 on set construction, making it necessary to utilize standing sets almost exclusively. There was, fortunately, a great deal to choose from at RKO, which in addition to the Hollywood studio had use of the big 40-acre backlot and stages at RKO-Pathe (now Laird Inter-national Studio) in Culver City and the RKO ranch at Encino.

Lewton said it was from Schlom that he learned to lavish greater care in dressing one or two major sets and skimping by on the rest. Accordingly, the main action focuses on the cat girl's studio apartment, the exterior of which was a brownstone front on Pathe's venerable New York street. The marvelous stairway, used a few months earlier for Orson Welles' Magnificent Ambersons and still standing on a Pathe sound stage, was altered by adding an adjacent elevator cage from the scene dock. The Central Park settings were familiar to lovers of the Astaire-Rogers musicals and some offices and stairways were left over from the 1941 comedy, The Devil and Miss Jones.

A standing cafe set was dressed as a coffee shop for one sequence, a pet store for another and a Serbian cafe for a third. Wild walls set up with props from the scene docks made up most of the sets that couldn't be redressed. Unit art director Walter Keller so artfully disguised these sets as to obscure any suggestion of "hand-me-down" origins. They were smothered in appropriate decor by set decorator Al Fields, who combed the property department and prop rental houses for items significant to the development of the characters as well as the story.

Casting was an important aspect of the plan to avoid horror film conventions. "I'd like to have a girl with a little kitten-face like Simone Simon, cute and soft and cuddly and seemingly not at all dangerous," Lewton wrote to Ostrow. "I took a look at the Paramount picture The Island of Lost Souls and after seeing their much-publicized 'panther woman,' I feel that any attempt to secure a cat-like quality in our girl's physical appearance would be absolutely disastrous." Bodeen recalled that "Val told me from the first to write the part of Irena around Simone Simon. He seemed confident that he would be able to get her."

A leading star in her native France, Miss Simon had made a number of films in the United States, but never achieved the popularity her sponsors at 20th Century-Fox had anticipated. Lewton sent the actress a copy of the first draft script while she was appearing on stage in Chicago and she quickly accepted at rather generous terms.

For the ambiguous character of psychiatrist Dr. Judd, first visualized as a sinister European called Mueller, Lewton's first choice was the German actor Fritz Kortner, who would, he believed, "add a great deal of menace and a certain conceited continental quality that would make audiences dislike him." As the script developed, however, he decided to cast against type and have the character be a young and handsome Britisher. Likeable Tom Conway, a contract player who had recently succeeded his older brother, George Sanders, as star of RKO's popular Falcon series, was available and proved an apt choice.

Kent Smith, a successful Broadway leading man, who signed an RKO contract in 1941, had been in Hollywood for nine months without appearing in anything except some Army training films. Lewton saw Smith as he commuted to the studio every day on his bicycle and decided he might be an ideal Oliver, the film's quiet-man hero. Smith's sympathetic portrayal launched a long, solid film career.

Jane Randolph, also a contract player, was chosen for the second woman role because she was not the ingenue type usually favored for such parts. Tall and efficient-looking, she epitomized the modern career women who had come to the fore since the beginning of World War II. The other actors, even down to the bit players, were hand-picked by Tourneur and Lewton from the contract list and casting catalog. The most striking small role is that of the cat-like woman who appears in only one scene—an unforgettable cameo by the statuesque Elizabeth Russell.

Cinematographer Nick Musuraca had been typed for some years as a photographer of Western and action pictures before he was assigned to Cat People. Musuraca's work for Lewton (for whom he shot five horror films altogether) established him as a master of highly dramatic lighting. His distinctive technique is now celebrated as the quintessential film hoir style. After making a string of similarly atmospheric films, including The Spiral Staircase (1945). The Locket (1946) and Out of the Past (1947), he complained bitterly that he had become type-cast again, this time as a mystery expert, and would like to shoot more "normal" pictures for a while.

Despite Lewton's determination to eschew the usual conventions of horror films, the lessons of the masters were not lost upon him. More innovations in sound recording technique were introduced in mystery and horror films than in the more readily accepted mainstream works. Lewton was adamant that dialogue should be used only when the story could not be advanced through the combination of visual image and natural sound.

When the cost accounting office demanded to know why John Cass's recording crew worked an extra three days on Cat People, it was explained that they spent one day at Gay's Lion Farm recording the growls and roars of the big cats and two days at the indoor swimming pool of the Royal Palms hotel recording reverberation effects. A vocal effects actress, Dorothy Lloyd, was hired to create the cat noises. The studio bosses regarded all this unusually extravagant for a "B" picture.

Unwilling to settle for the pastiche musical scores normally assembled for low budget pictures, Lewton conferred with musical director Constantin Bakaleinikoff and composer Roy Webb long before the screenplay was underway. Webb was brought into the story sessions to contribute ideas for linking visuals with music. Like most film composers, Webb was accustomed to being consulted only after the photography was completed. He later said that by being involved in the planning he was able to provide a more effective score.

"We were searching for a lullaby theme suited to a story about cats," wrote Lewton, "something with a haunting, memorable quality somewhat like the short bit from 'Anitra's Dance' which was used so memorably in the German picture M. And we wanted a little strain of music to be sung or hummed by the heroine, to have a cat-like feeling and a sinister note of menace." Unfortunately, none of the compositions considered had the qualities Lewton wanted.

Then one day on the set, Simone Simon sang for Lewton a traditional French lullaby she remembered from childhood, Do, Do, Baby Do. Webb agreed that it would make an ideal leitmotiv for the film. A Russian writer, Andrei Tolstoi, was hired to translate the lyrics into Russian and coach the actress in the proper pronunciation and delivery.

Although the stringent budgets of "B" films did not permit a great deal of visual effects work, Vernon Walker's excellent camera effects department made important contributions to the production. Veteran technical artist Al Simpson, after reading a request from Lewton for changes in a matte painting, scribbled a note to his boss: "Getting damned hard to please these 'B' producers."

Linwood Dunn, chief of the optical department, composited a beautifully crafted dream montage of graceful, animated art deco panthers, and diffused images of Tom Conway in ancient armor brandishing a sword, a crucial image in the story. He also supplied special transitional wipes that were deliberately soft edged and uneven so as to resemble amorphous shadows crossing the screen.

The most memorable optical effect shows Simone Simon beginning to change into a cat after being kissed by Tom Conway. It had been decided to avoid any scenes showing an actual metamorphosis from woman to panther, but upon viewing the sequence Tourneur and Lewton agreed that the closeup of the baby-faced actress backing away from the camera failed to convey sufficient menace to justify the following cut of Conway recoiling in horror. "There was no preparation of any kind for the effect, otherwise it would have been easy," Dunn said. "I made her darken by a complicated application of density manipulation and masking."

Principal photography for Cat People was completed in 24 days with a budget of $118,948, quickly revised to $141,659 after shooting began. The picture was actually brought in under budget at $134,959. Ostrow wanted to fire Tourneur after viewing the first three days of rushes, but once again Koerner supported Lewton and the production proceeded smoothly.

Some of the department heads grumbled about Lewton's fastidiousness, which extended even to the credit titles. He insisted that the writing credit be changed to "Written by …" instead of "Original Screen Play by …" because it would make a "smoother and more tasteful" title card. Having cleared this point with the screenwriters guild, he had the writer's card moved from its customary position (preceeding the technical credits) to appear between the producer and director credits. Lewton believed the writer should receive equal recognition with the director and producer.

Lewton also insisted upon opening and closing the film with literary quotations—an uncommon delicacy even among the more pretentious films of the time. The film is prefaced by a quote from a work supposedly by Dr. Louis Judd, The Atavism of Fear: "Even as fog continues to lie in the valleys, so does ancient sin cling to the low places, the depressions in the world's consciousness." Instead of the traditional end title, a quotation from John Donne's Holy Sonnet V appears: "But black sin has condemn'd to endless night / My world, both parts, and both parts must die."

The preview was a great success—much to the amazement of most of the studio executives. It was decided, however, that the panther, which had been represented in the original version only by indistinct shadows, must be shown in the sequence where it threatens Oliver and Alice in his drafting room at work. Trainer Mel Koontz and his panther were brought back for one day of filming. Through clever staging by Tourneur and cutting by Robson, the three obligatory cuts of the cat seem almost imaginary, yet are sufficiently palpable to satisfy the demands of the more literal minded.

Cat People proved to be a big money maker, outgrossing much bigger pictures in many cities. It also received wide acclaim within the industry. David Selznick, in a letter to Koerner, said, "I wish that other studios were turning out small budget pictures that were comparable in intelligence and taste with Lewton's first film."

But the film is not totally flawless; there are occasional clumsy moments and the Lewton-Tourneur team is a bit too continental to put over the idea of ordinary working people with complete conviction. It is a classic, nevertheless, both for its own intrinsic value and, as a turning point in the genre, with its effectively macabre style that relied on suggesting the presence of the monster without actually showing it. This technique has been often imitated, but rarely improved upon.

While it is a story of good versus evil, it is hardly as simplistic as that. Irena is driven to evil by forces beyond her control, as are the central characters in all of Lewton's horror films. The title character of Lewton's The Leopard Man states the case perfectly as he watches a ball dancing in the jet of a fountain: "We know as little of the forces that move us and move the world around us as that empty ball."

Simone Simon captures Irena's ambivalent nature very well. Her natural child-like charm is disarming. She conveys quickly that she is fear-ridden, but it is only gradually that she betrays any hint of the sinister. Kent Smith and Jane Randolph are sufficiently down-to-earth to create a realistic ambience that makes the fantasy more believable. Conway is a convincing Dr. Judd, a role that could have been inexplicable if less skillfully played.

Both Musuraca's photography and Keller's sets are perfectly keyed. Interiors have the kind of delicate shadings found in fine etchings, with rich shadows and striking highlights. The exteriors are also strong on atmosphere, with change of seasons clearly defined, from the Indian summer beginning through the rain, snow and mist of winter.

The use of sound is equally creative. The distant noises of the omnipresent zoo animals, the terrifying echos in the swimming pool, the clacking of high heels during a chase through the park, the sudden hush as the pursuit becomes a silent one, the rustling of leaves in darkness, the nerve-jarring hissing of air brakes on a bus at the instant one expects a deadly panther to leap into the scene—these are sounds cunningly married to the visuals to inspire unease, fear, suspense and shock. The bus gag proved so successful that Lewton used it in other films and whether the intruder was a train, a horse, a tumbleweed or an Apache warrior, Lewton always called it a "bus."

Roy Webb's music conveys an undercurrent of menace without becoming obtrusive, adding immeasurably to the gathering atmosphere of dread. It meshes perfectly with Musuraca's photographic style (the teaming was often repeated). The deployment of Irena's childish song as counterpoint to a heavily dramatic theme is ingenious.

The subtleties of the film are too numerous to catalogue. There are, for example, the cat images that permeate the scenes. The most prominent prop in Irena's apartment is a folding screen upon which is painted a handsome art deco panther slinking through the jungle, a motif introduced earlier as a title background. A Goya print in which cats appear hangs in the apartment, and there are tiger lilies in a florist shop window. And there is a nice moment when Alice, shuddering because she senses she is being watched, explains that "A cat just walked over my grave." Perhaps some of the psychological fear that dominates Cat People derives from the fact that Lewton himself had what he called "an atavistic fear of cats."

Lewton went on to produce 10 more pictures for RKO, all but two of them in the horror genre. All were distinctive; several approached perfection. They were: IWalked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, The Seventh Victim and The Ghostship (1943); The Curse of the Cat People, Youth Runs Wild and Mademoiselle Fifi (1944); Isle of the Dead and The Body Snatcher (1945); and Bedlam (1946). All were predicated like Cat People on "intelligence and taste" and, as the titles suggest, all were exploited in the most lurid manner. Lewton was thoroughly disenchanted with RKO by the mid-'40s, and after Koerner died of leukemia, he realized he could never achieve his ambitions there.

Unfortunately, he was never satisfied with his work again. During stints at Paramount and MGM, he produced what he considered his worst pictures and an attempt to form an independent company failed after a series of disagreements. Only for his last production, a Technicolor western called Apache Drums (1951), did he get back to the formulas he established with his RKO films, using suspense, terror, psychological insight and artistry to great effect. He died in March of 1951 while engaged on preproduction work for the Stanley Kramer Company.

The other members of the RKO horror unit went on with long and illustrious careers. Tourneur, who directed two other Lewton films (I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man), directed a total of 28 pictures. Mark Robson and Robert Wise, who both started as editors, eventually directed films for Lewton. Wise directed The Curse of the Cat People, The Body Snatcher and went on to direct The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Andromeda Strain.

DeWitt Bodeen was promoted after writing Seventh Victim and The Curse of the Cat People, and contributed scripts for many successful pictures, including I Remember Mama (1947) and Billy Budd (1962). Though it reteamed Kent Smith and Simone Simon, The Curse of the Cat People was an oblique followup to the original with a totally different slant, a poetic fantasy centering on Oliver's little daughter, who conjures up Irena as a benign, imaginary playmate.

"I think it's overrated," said Bodeen of the followup. "Val and I had a dispute over it because he completely rewrote the ending I'd done. I think his ending ruined it. [Lewton's ending suggests Irena's spirit is purely imaginary.] I wanted it to be more supernatural, more of a horror story. Lewton resented being considered a horror specialist, I think. But it was what he did best."

In a 1944 press release, Lewton summed up his approach to the horror film in one short paragraph. He was speaking of The Seventh Victim, but the formula applies to Cat People as well:

"This picture's appeal, like that of its predecessors, is based on three fundamental theories," he said. "First is that audiences will people any patch of prepared darkness with more horror, suspense and frightfulness than the most imaginative writer could dream up. Second, and most important, is the fact that extraordinary things can happen to very ordinary people. And third is to use the beauty of the setting and camera work to ward off audience laughter at situations which, when less beautifully photographed, might seem ludicrous."

By these means was Val Lewton able to dramatize man's natural fear of the unknown, of things that can't be seen but only imagined. Through the resources of the cinema he expressed the universal, primitive fears and superstitions that survive in all of us.