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Cat People



The first of the horror films producer Val Lewton made for RKO Pictures redefined the genre by leaving its most frightening terrors to its audience's imagination. Simone Simon stars as a Serbian émigré in Manhattan who believes that, because of an ancient curse, any physical intimacy with the man she loves (Kent Smith) will turn her into a feline predator. Lewton, a consummate producer-auteur who oversaw every aspect of his projects, found an ideal director in Jacques Tourneur, a chiaroscuro stylist adept at keeping viewers off-kilter with startling compositions and psychological innuendo. Together, they eschewed the canned effects of earlier monster movies in favor of shocking with subtle shadows and creative audio cues. One of the studio's most successful movies of the 1940s, Cat People raised the creature feature to new heights of sophistication and mystery.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New, restored 2K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary from 2005 featuring film historian Gregory Mank, with excerpts from an audio interview with actor Simone Simon
• Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, a 2008 feature-length documentary that explores the life and career of the legendary Hollywood producer
• Interview with director Jacques Tourneur from 1977
• New interview with cinematographer John Bailey about the look of the film
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by critic Geoffrey O'Brien

Should've just let Warners do this themselves if that's all they're going to bring to the table apart from porting from the DVD

C'mon mate. That whacky C and those numbers on the spine aren't cheap.

Surprised they didn't throw in the sequel given how short both films are.

There's an hour long doc on Tourneur doing the rounds on french TV at present and the extras from Wild Side's Nightfall DVD that would have sat nicely on this one.

I'm surprised Criterion didn't include the Bruce Eder commentary from their laserdisc.

NABOB OF NOWHERE wrote:There's an hour long doc on Tourneur doing the rounds on french TV at present and the extras from Wild Side's Nightfall DVD that would have sat nicely on this one.

Let's hope it makes it on to their release of I Walked With a Zombie!

Feego wrote:I'm surprised Criterion didn't include the Bruce Eder commentary from their laserdisc.

I was expecting, at the very least, that. I'm probably in the minority but I like his tracks so I'm a bit disappointed.

I listened to Eder's track on The Most Dangerous Game not too long ago and found it quite good. It's exactly what you want from a scholarly commentary, informative and easygoing. Perhaps there wasn't much in it that isn't also in the Mank track? But yes, I too thought one of the goals of re-releasing old laserdisc titles was to bring back their old supplements as well.

cdnchris wrote:

Feego wrote:I'm surprised Criterion didn't include the Bruce Eder commentary from their laserdisc.

I was expecting, at the very least, that. I'm probably in the minority but I like his tracks so I'm a bit disappointed.

I've only heard (as far as I can remember) his tracks for The Lady Vanishes and 49th Parallel but I really enjoyed both of them.

I had assumed that making use of Eder's track was the primary impetus for acquiring this from Warner in the first place. I like his tracks too. I'm going to need to hang on to the Warner disc for Curse of the Cat People any way, so I'm certainly not in any hurry to pick this up. I'm also surprised that there aren't any contributions from Chris Fujiwara, who literally wrote the book on Tourneur.

I feel like Criterion actually exerted more energy in making this as underwhelming as it is

Wow, I asked about the lack of the Eder commentary and got a quick response:

Both commentaries were carefully evaluated while working on the release of CAT PEOPLE, and we concluded that the 2005 Gregory Mark commentary was more updated and a better fit.

I'm guessing they covered the same ground and they felt the Mark one was better because it had more up to date material? I guess I understand that. Still a bit disappointed but c'est la vie I guess.

I'm also another Bruce Eder fan so it would have been nice to hear the older commentary, but the Gregory Mank track is fine too! (I presume the Simone Simon interview interspersed throughout it also tipped the balance in its favour too, just because it provides the chance to hear the actress speak about her role) I'm actually relieved though that I didn't make a special effort to track down and import the Kent Jones documentary now. It was one of those things that I kept meaning to do but other things kept coming up, so at least that will be something new to me!

One amusing thing mentioned in the commentaries is that the strangely lavish look of these Lewton 'B-movies' partly comes about from being made in the wake of the relative commercial failure of RKO's big budget Magnificent Ambersons, so the expensive sets are being reutilised in these smaller budgeted pieces! See how in particular the staircase from Ambersons keeps turning up in different films - its used in the boarding school at the beginning of The Seventh Victim for example, and in Cat People is put into use as the staircase up to Irina's apartment.

Would this be the first Val Lewton Blu-ray release?

If you don't count Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie released in Japan from Lobster Films restorations

I just got the LD so it will be interesting to compare the tracks when this is released.

I know most people will prefer the BluRay but why is the film on DVD in SINGLE LAYER ???

Probably because there's a second disc for all the bonus features, and the film is only 73 minutes long. A dual layer disc would be unnecessary to achieve a maximum DVD bitrate.