How thou'rt translated
The Wolf Man and The Cat People make an oddly appropriate couple as movies go.  I'm not just being cute with the titles, either.  Their plots are the same overall shape: the hero, an otherwise quite nice person, is also a bloodthirsty monster.  Hero can't do a thing to fix it.  Hero confides in a few trusted people.  Some of them don't believe the hero, and some of them know but are powerless to help.  One is in a position to help.  He tries to help, then fails, and lets the hero down dismally.  We watch the hero's existence get rapidly more awful.  The hero kills someone, and ends up dead.

The whole plot of Cat People is driven by a horrible secret.  Well, scratch that, it would be a horrible secret, except that the hero, Irina, told her boyfriend all about it in the first sequence.  It's about as far from a frigging secret as you can get.  She invites this nice young man over to her apartment, and tells him all about how she thinks she is a cat-witch-devil-worshiping-person, descended from a Serbian witch cult.  She even has a whole collection of creepy cat art, with a Salvator Rosa painting of evil kittens and a statue of a knight skewering a cat on a sword.  Later on, it turns out that she fears she is fated to do what her mother did, and turn into a monster that will kill her own mate if she ever has sex or even so much as makes out.  (Question: why would the Devil want to make women do this?  Assuming that Satan wants to propagate his own special race of cat people, wouldn't killing their mates kind of keep their population numbers low?  Where is the evolutionary advantage?  ...I know, I shouldn't look too closely.)  And Mr. Nice Guy brushes it all off as mere peasant superstition.  There's none so deaf as those who won't hear.

Despite this, and despite never managing to land a kiss on Irina, Nice Guy falls in love with her and asks her to marry him.  He scoffs at all her worries, every single one of them.  This was the point when my heart really began to sink.  Then they get married and she won't have sex with him, even though she's obviously dying for it.  She begs him to give her some time, just as they walk into the apartment after getting married, and he assures her that of course he'll be patient with her, of course he will, she can have all the time in the world...  The cynical members of the audience sigh as they realize how wrong that nice man is going to be, and how little he will be able to keep his promise.  So they cohabit, yet keep to different bedrooms.  That would have been almost funny if Simone Simon wasn't such a good actress.  You see her go into her bedroom and shut the door against her husband, then lean on the door and yearn for him so hard that it hurts.  It's one of those, "If you stay with me, I'll hurt you" situations, and yet he doesn't know it.  She even told the idiot all about it, but he wouldn't listen. 

And her?  She won't even experiment with the terms of her curse.  You know... you watch the movie and say, "Well, how about if she just lets him kiss her a little bit?  In the middle of a crowd, in broad daylight?  Hey, how about they cuddle on the sofa just till she becomes slightly cat-like, and then he can run for his life?  He can deal with just a little bit of peril."  I call this the "Can I do it just until I need glasses?" school of boundary-pushing.  If I were Cat Person, I would totally, you know, find out what exactly I could get away with.  And hey, you know, maybe she's only partly right!  Maybe her Giant Evil Cat Self will only emerge if she gets angry, whereas she can have sex any time she wants.  Maybe her parents were having an argument, way back then, and her mother just lost control and catted out.  ...But that's all matter for a comedy.  The tragedy is that the characters never overcome their own fear (on her side) and ignorance (on his side), even as far as to work on a solution together.

Hey, you know what I just realized.  The Sohma family in Fruits Basket are like Irina, only they're played for comedy as well as drama.

Eventually, her husband (sorry, can't remember his name, will call him Nice Guy) can't keep on ignoring the fact that he's married to a girl who won't shag him and who is constantly upset about something or other.  He makes her go to a shrink.  The scenes with the shrink are really cringe-inducing: yet another man who still won't believe a word she says, only this one isn't even well-meaning.  He's an evil weasel.  (I want to do a whole separate post on the role of psychoanalysts in weird film.  It's not a very glorious role.  They're mostly there to come out with creepy double-talk and make matters worse for the heroes.)  He gets Irina's story by hypnotizing her, in a deliberately weird and alienating scene where he shines a light on her face in a darkened room.  And it's the same old story all over again: he scoffs much more loudly at her fears than Nice Guy did, delivers a snap judgment in pompous-windbag Freudian terms, and tells her that he knows what's best for her.

Meanwhile, Nice Guy is feeling neglected.  He starts making eyes at one of his female co-workers.  And there Irina is, the third wheel in her own marriage.  She can't even touch her husband, but Alice can.  He doesn't understand Irina, but he doesn't really want to anymore, and instead he's working late at the office getting to understand Alice.  It hurt to watch.  As it said in one of the reviews I read (what, doesn't everybody scour the Net for reviews when they like a movie, just to feel the love?), Irina gets trapped in a positive feedback loop where, every time she turns him down or refuses to touch him, he goes off and spends more time with Alice, which in turn makes her miserable and more inclined to reject him, which in turn makes him reject her more.  I felt for both of them.  (Not for Alice, so much.  She's a big girl and should know better than to hang around married men.)  But for a while, I was holding out hope that this wasn't going to be the turning point of the plot.  Perhaps it would just be kept in the background, and, when Irina died (I always knew Irina would die at the end), Alice could be chastely brought in as a replacement for our heartbroken hero.  

Nope. 

Nice Guy gives up on Irina.  He falls for Alice, because he's desperate for a nice normal girl who will actually give him some affection, and he gives up on his misery of a wife.  All those promises of all the patience in the world?  Gone.  He meant well, but meaning well isn't enough.  He's a better person than most ordinary humans, but that isn't enough to help Irina.  Could anybody have helped her?  Maybe not.  Maybe no person with a hereditary curse can ever be helped, or help herself.  But it's implicit in their marriage that he would try to help her, and in the process, he made her lavish promises of infinite patience and understanding.  And he couldn't live up to them.  He snapped under the strain of actually having to live with a hurting, broken wife.  Like whoever the guy was who married Melusine, he snapped.  I feel bad for him, but worse for her.  When he rejects her at last, there's a strange shot of her peering over the back of the couch, muttering that she loves darkness and the night, and she feels more comfortable alone, anyhow.  It sounds more as though she's failing to convince herself that she never wanted him in the first place. 

The movie is famous for never showing a transformation sequence and keeping its monster all but offstage.  There are a few lovely shots of the black panther into which Irina eventually turns, though.  It's beautiful.  I'd say the implication-to-revelation ratio was just about perfect.  (There's also an unintentionally funny sequence where Irina has nightmares.  She sees black cats running towards her with glowing eyes.  They're cute cartoon black cats with bell-bottom legs.  I don't think that was supposed to be endearing, but it was.)

Irina kills the psychologist, who has unendeared himself to the audience enough, by that point, that his death made me want to stand up and cheer.  He's a stand-in for her husband: both men lust after Irina and both of them think she's crazy and want to have her committed to an asylum.  At the moment when she kills him, he's just been forcing a kiss on her and threatening her with institutionalization; her husband, though, never threatened her, never forced himself on her, and honestly thought he was acting for her own good when he called in the shrink.  And so she manages to restrain herself from catting out and killing her husband.  Her other grudge against him was jealousy, and she manages to overcome that, insofar as she just looks sadly at him and walks away, mortally wounded by the shrink.  (He was carrying a swordcane.  This is a rather fitter villain than most movie psychoanalysts.)  She walks off with half a swordblade sticking through her chest, heads to the Central Park Zoo in the middle of the night, lets the panther out of its cage, and lets it kill her. 

Now: a reversal of the usual trend.  Instead of a monster dying and being afforded the dignity of human form as it fades away... When her husband and his lover catch up, Irina has turned into a giant, ferocious black panther, still wearing Irina's fur coat and still punctured by a swordblade.  The two of them stare at her, aghast.  "Everything she told us was true."  And after a moment, they turn around and hurry away into the fog together.  The End.  There was none of the mushy stuff that I wanted so much.  No, "Oh my God, I was horrible to her, and now I can never tell her I'm sorry."  No, "Irina!  Let me cradle your poor dying form while I weep copiously!"  Nobody even says, "Hey, maybe we should take her pulse," or, "Are you sure this isn't some kind of weird prank?  Maybe she put her coat on a dead panther just for a laugh.  She's that weird."  No; they just accept it at face value and hurry off together, like the twits they have become, because they can't wait to get her out of their lives.  Cat women never get a break, even in death.

I didn't actually cry over this movie, but my heart has been aching about it for the last few days.  It hurt, but in the very best way, because it got to my own demons.  

From what I hear about the sequel, Curse of the Cat People, it has very little to do with the first movie.  Since everything is deeper with haiku:

Val Lewton's sequel
Has no curse or cat people:
The egg cream of noir.

Oh, and I have all sorts of opinions about The Wolf Man, too.  Tomorrow for those.