I really didn't plan a cat theme, but someone mentioned this movie a few months ago and I thought "hm, if I ever ditch the idea of sticking to movies from specific years, I will have to write about that one." So, done and done! It was a pleasure to sit down last night and rewatch this. Producer Val Lewton (supposedly an ailurophobe himself) created a B-movie classic with his hastily-assembled "Cat People."

Adorably kittenish Irena (baby-faced Simone Simon) meets aw-shucks nice guy Oliver (Kent Smith) outside the panther cage at her local zoo, and quickly has him captivated. But she refuses to let him kiss her, and after their wedding, she expresses a trembling fear of marital intimacy, which Oliver is way too nice to pressure her about. Irena, it turns out, comes from a village in Serbia that's the legendary home of evil, shapeshifting "cat people"; she's afraid that if she surrenders to physical passion, she'll transform into a lethal cat and tear Oliver to shreds. Yoicks!

At first the film seems like a lurid but relatively plausible little psychodrama. A shrink is called in, the oily Dr. Judd (Tom Conway), who taps his cigarette ash and smiles: "These problems are relatively simple for psychiatrists." But then Oliver starts confiding in beautiful colleague Alice (Jane Randolph) about his marital problems — and Alice soon finds herself menaced by something that's definitely not human.

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