Cat People

Cat People (1942), directed by Jacques Tourneur, Criterion remaster, encoded in 10 bit HEVC with AAC sound, including original theatrical mono, commentary track, and English subtitles.

IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034587/

Video encoded in two-pass 9 002 kbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image.

English SDH subtitles OCRed, proofed and corrected.

Note : More Jacques Tourneur classics here, this is perhaps his most well-known film, a for the time novel little story about a woman who thinks she's cursed with a hereditary trait that makes her turn into a big cat when aroused. It's also notable for introducing the "Lewton Bus", the technique of building suspense gradually and then releasing it with a jump scare that turns out to be something innocuous (in many later iterations, this was a cat suddely jumping out), named after producer Val Lewton, who used it in several subsequent films. It's a nice little character piece, subtle and subdued, lit and filmed like a film noir, hinging on what I think are pretty solid performances.

Irena Dubrovna, a Serbian immigrant working as a fashion illustrator in New York, meets handsome engineer Oliver Reed, and they develop a relationship. She tells him of how her village in Serbia was, according to legend, slowly turned to devil worship while being enslaved by the Mameluk Turks, and that only when Christianity returned, the evil, represented in a statue as a large cat, was defeated, with some of the remaining devil worshipers escaping into the mountains. Irena is strangely afraid of intimacy, even kisses, but even so, the two eventually marry. It turns out Irena believes arousal or intimacy will make her turn into a cat and kill her lover, and even sending her to a psychiatrist doesn't do much to help. Oliver eventually develops a relationship with a co-worker, and when Irena begins to suspect, the woman finds herself stalked by an unseen beast...

This Criterion remaster is pretty middle of the road, not particularly sharp or clean, but it does the job. Original mono track likewise acceptable, and the commentary is interesting enough.

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