films, page 13 of 31

Like other fantasy films of the era (King Kong springs to mind, with its “And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty…”), 1942’s Cat People opens with a made-up quote, this time from a fictional psychiatrist instead of a made-up prophet: “Even as fog continues to lie in the valleys, so does ancient sin cling to the low places, the depressions in the world consciousness.” Almost immediately, this is followed by another, and far more appropriate, quote, this time a sign above a zoo litter bin: “Let no one say, and it to your shame, That all was beauty here, until you came.” Because, in a way, this is Irena’s fate: that she, with her dark, Serbian-witch-village ways of difficult passions and were-cattery, comes to this placid, modern, American paradise and ruins the lives of Ollie and Alice, a rather lukewarm not-yet couple wholly unprepared to deal with the psychological complexities of foreigners with hereditary supernatural curses. Kitten-faced Irena’s first action in the film is to mar the “beauty” of the zoo’s fake-tree-stump bin (like the rest of the zoo, a highly sanitised version of the true wilds of nature) by tossing a torn-up sketch at it and missing; her last act is to die in pretty much the same spot, littering the place with her mangled pantherine corpse.

Cat People is generally known nowadays as a horror film that worked through restraint rather than excess, a triumph of spookiness and moody lighting over the lurid horrors of the era’s Universal creature features. But I like it as much for its subtleties of character — it’s far more about a troubled human soul than it is simply about a woman who turns into a panther. But, all the same, it is about a woman who turns into a panther, so, you know, you get two films in one.

The basic story is that Irena (Simone Simon), working as a sketch artist for the fashion industry, attracts the attention of ship designer Ollie (Kent Smith), who very soon asks her to marry him. And they do marry, but Irena, it turns out, has a pathological fear of intimacy. She asks him to be patient. Ollie complies, but soon starts to worry it’s Irena’s odd upbringing that’s at fault — she comes from a village in Serbia where certain women, her mother included, had a reputation for turning into panthers when their passions were roused. Conspiring with his healthy-minded pal and co-worker Alice, Ollie gets Irena to see a psychiatrist, the rather too suave Dr Judd (Tom Conway). But Irena knows he can’t help her — Dr Judd thinks it’s all in her pretty little mind, but actually it’s a sickness of the soul. And when Ollie starts spending more and more time with pally Alice, Irena gives in to her atavistic side. She may not know how to fully love her new American husband, but she can scare off a rival like nobody else…

But the most affecting aspect of Cat People is Irena’s struggles to, first of all, be normal — which she initially achieves only by living and working in New York while making no friends, and avoiding anything like romantic entanglements — then her battles with her deep, inner wildness.

Set against this is the utter incomprehension of her frankly shallow, if well-meaning, husband. Ollie’s is a world of “normal, happy lives”, where to say to someone, “Oh, you crazy kid,” is to make a light joke, not get dangerously close to the mark. “I’ve never been unhappy before,” he tells his girl-pal Alice, whose own definition of love includes “no self-torture, no doubt”, a state where “nothing can change us.” Irena, though, is all self-torture and doubt. And quite literal change. America, civilisation and modernity are too much for her. When she finally lets the cat loose she first of all seems to feel shame (wiping her mouth with a handkerchief after mauling some local sheep, half-turned away from the camera), then triumph (having menaced Alice in an ill-lit swimming pool). It’s only at this point that Dr Judd proves to be a blessing. A smugly self-satisfied character who finds everything so “charming” — Irena’s story, Alice’s dawning belief in it, but most of all the love triangle he sees as providing him with a rather unprofessional in with the troubled Irena — yet he carries a sword-cane around with him (as a psychiatrist, he must be aware of the Freudian implications of that), and when he forces himself on Irena (perhaps this is just his attempt to “break the will of the patient”, as he says must sometimes be done, but his manner is rather too oily for that to be true), she at last has a legitimate outlet, someone to turn into a panther for and kill without ruining the “beauty” of Ollie and Alice’s “normal, happy lives”.

And “She never lied to us” is about the most those two can say, as though, in the face of the revelation that a woman really can turn into a panther, they still have to find a platitude to say about her now she’s dead.

As much as it’s a horror film, Cat People is a tragedy. Irena battles bravely against the darkness within — her breakthroughs and lapses are awful to see — but she’s stuck in a land, RKO film-set New York, where everyone else seems entirely prepared to live life as if it were a light comedy-romance. Yet here is she, a three-dimensional character amidst the two dimensional (the lecherous Dr Judd) and the one (poor old Ollie, who’s “never been unhappy before”, and doesn’t seem to have learned much by the end of the picture).

Cat People is the sort of horror film I like — one that is less about horror than it is about darkness, particularly the darkness of the human soul. Its producer, Val Lewton, went on to make a few more good films of a similar type, and I’ll be reviewing two more over the next couple of Mewsings: Curse of the Cat People (a rather unusual sequel to Cat People), and I Walked with a Zombie (made with Cat People‘s director, Jacques Tourneur).

…the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. [William Gibson’s description of a wasp’s nest, from Neuromancer.]

As a sort of followup to my previous look at Anthony Powell and Ursula Le Guin’s script for an Earthsea film, I thought I’d look at another un-produced film script by a favourite author: William Gibson’s go at Alien3. It’s odd to think, given the William Gibson we have now — author of three trilogies of literary techno-thrillers set in a series of progressively closer futures — that he might once have been considered the obvious candidate for an Alien script. The draft that’s out there on the internet (I got mine here) is apparently an early one, Gibson’s first ever go at a movie script, for which he only had the scripts for Alien and Aliens as a guide. (According to Gary Westfahl’s book on Gibson, this is actually a “shortened version” of what Gibson produced.) Gibson’s Alien3 is far more the sort of thing you’d expect as a followup to those first two films than what we actually got. It’s also far more a product of the 80s, when it was presumably written, than the overpoweringly dark 90s film David Fincher ultimately produced.

It starts with the Sulaco — the spaceship carrying Ripley, Newt, Hicks and Bishop at the end of Aliens — straying briefly into the territory of the Union of Progressive Peoples, a clear USSR-analog, considering the fact that they exist in an uneasy nuclear standoff with the “capitalist cartels” that include the Weyland Yutani corporation, and the fact that their people have names like Suslov and Lenko. The UPP board the Sulaco, lose one man to a face-hugger (Gibson gets the alien action in quickly — a face-hugger and full-size creatures within the first few pages), then depart with android Bishop’s upper body, before letting the Sulaco drift on, to be picked up by the space station Anchorpoint (“the size of a small moon”). Anchorpoint supposedly has no military or Company loyalties — it’s populated by what the Company’s Milisci division dismiss as “idealists”, “liberals”, and people with “a certain antipathy to Military Sciences”, in other words ordinary citizens — but the Company have been wanting this bio-weapon since Alien, and they’re not going to let anything get in their way. The trouble is, as they soon realise, the UPP have probably got the alien, too, and it’s at this point the script seems most of its era: the UPP and the Company both suspect that the other is going to develop the alien for potential use as a weapon, therefore the only thing to do is develop it themselves just to keep up. A biological arms race begins. And, with the alien creature as technology rather than just a movie monster, this seems far more like William Gibson territory.

Gibson reworks the alien, stripping it back literally to its DNA. In one scene, we get to see how a strand of alien bio-matter wraps itself around human DNA and transforms it instantaneously. (In a nice touch, a microscope shot of alien bio-matter reveals how its micro-structure echoes the macro: its “lines and textures recalling the interior of the derelict ship in ALIEN.”) Suddenly, the alien is not just the creature we’ve encountered in the previous two films, it’s a virus that works at the genetic level. Gibson’s “New Beast”, as he calls it, doesn’t emerge as a chest-burster, but as a full-person burster, ripping off its human host like the Hulk rips off a shirt. And it’s not only humans who get the alien-DNA-bonding experience. Gibson gives us an alien lemur, primates strung up with Giger-goo awaiting “the change”, and even an alien-ised cabbage.

Yes, an alien-ised cabbage:

Two of the Styrofoam structures have been overgrown with a grayish parody of vegetation, glistening vine-like structures and bulbous sacs that echo the Alien biomech motif. Patches of thick black mould spread to the styrofoam and the white deck.

HICKS: It was… cabbages or something…

Back in the UPP, before the aliens escape, Gibson has one of his pseudo-Soviets speculate on the technological nature of the aliens:

SUSLOV: Perhaps it is the fruit of some ancient experiment… A living artefact, the product of genetic engineering… A weapon. Perhaps we are looking at the end result of yet another arms race…

(Which chimes in nicely with the direction Ridley Scott took the franchise in with Prometheus.)

For about half the script, Gibson’s Alien3 brushes against the sort of futuristic Cold War techno-thriller that’s more his kind of thing. Then the alien breaks free in both the UPP space station and Anchorpoint, and we’re where we expect an Alien film to be: a race to escape from the base before it self-destructs, but on a larger scale than the previous two films. Gibson sticks to the Alien and Aliens formula, but uses his new, viral version of the alien to provide some interesting riffs on what we’ve already seen (including a man turning into an alien while in a space-suit, and an alien chase in the vacuum outside the space station).

Ripley is all but absent, waking up only to see an alien and become instantly catatonic. Newt, too, is seemingly there for continuity’s sake alone. (She gets shipped off to Earth before the aliens escape. And Ripley is jettisoned in a lifeboat while still comatose, so she can return for a sequel.) The main stars of this version of Alien3 are Hicks (the surviving marine from Aliens) and Bishop.

The script has a few signature moments of laconic description from Gibson the hard-boiled techno-writer and futuristic beatnik: “The cubicle, terminally sloppy, resembles the nest of a high-tech hamster.” “His office is furnished in the best futuro-Pentagon style…” “…his smile a heartless display of state-of-the-art enamel-bonding techniques”. A chest-burster is “suspended there like an eyeless fetal dolphin”. Best line of all, though, has to be: “The Aliens tear into the Marines like living chainsaws.”

At the end, Gibson opens the way to further sequels by having Bishop suggest it’s time to stop running from the aliens, track them down to their source, and wipe them out:

BISHOP: This goes far beyond mere interspecies competition. These creatures are to biological life what antimatter is to matter.

He even suggests this might be a way to end the Cold War:

You’re a species again, Hicks. United against a common enemy.

I quite like Gibson’s Alien3. Had it been made, it would have been more what people expected from the franchise, though its transformation of the aliens from large-scale creatures to a sort of genetic virus would have ramped up the pace of future films to near Apocalyptic proportions — suddenly, anything could at any moment turn into an alien version of itself. And with Newt (infected?) already shipped off to Earth, and Ripley drifting yet again in a lifeboat, you can see how an Alien 4 might map out.

According to David Giler (on the making-of documentary on the Alien3 Blu-Ray), they got Gibson to write the script because they were expecting a lot of good ideas that could then be formed into a proper film script, but what they got, in his opinion, was “a perfectly-executed script that wasn’t all that interesting.” I can see what he means, in that Gibson toes the line of the previous two films, rather than providing the sort of game-changing wild ideas you might have expected from this happening, hip new writer. But this expectation may have been down to misunderstanding just what it was that was happening and hip about Gibson. He wasn’t — and isn’t — a machine for transforming genres, although that may have been how he was perceived at the time; he’s a writer who’s best at doing his own thing, who just happened to transform a genre (SF, cyberpunk) on the way.

For Star Wars day…