Cat People (1982)

Cat People (1982) 4/5

 The legacy of Paul Schrader’s Cat People might have less to do with the film than with the David Bowie/Giorgio Moroder theme song “Cat People (Putting out Fire with Gasoline),” which has appeared in films like Atomic Blonde as well as unexpectedly shown up the American version of The Office. Quentin Tarantino’s use of the song in Inglorious Basterds is an absolute showstopper. Bowie clearly liked the results so much that he wanted to put the track on his album Let’s Dance, but because MCA refused to let the song be released by Bowie’s label EMI, he had to make due with a re-recorded version, which just doesn’t have the same lush atmosphere that Moroder was able to pull off.

But this review isn’t about what a great song “Cat People” happens to be or even how amazing Bowie was (because if you get me started, we’ll be here all night. No, this review is of the actual Cat People remake directed by Paul Schrader and released in 1982, which is doubly overshadowed, by both the original and the song. But if you’re willing to resonate at the same frequency as the film, then you’ll appreciate what Schrader accomplishes with his take on the b-movie turned horror classic.

The film begins with a prologue that takes place in an unspecified time and place, perhaps an imaginative take on northern Africa. The very first shot is of blood red sand that blows away to reveal skulls and bone fragments. We then see as women are ritually tied to a gnarled, naked tree and consumed by leopards. A pall of red shrouds the images, which are pure Hollywood constructs, put together through sets and matte paintings. The artificiality only enhances the dreamlike atmosphere of the wordless introduction before cutting to the film’s version of Irene, played by Nastassja Kinski, arriving in New Orleans.

She’s there to meet here brother, Paul (Malcolm McDowell), but curiously doesn’t recognize him when he approaches. We’re not immediately clued into the backstory between Irene and Paul, but they were separated when they were younger and are just now reuniting. I’ll avoid major spoilers, but in the long tradition of Malcolm McDowell playing a creep, there’s an immediate incestuous subtext. It should also come as no surprise that Paul, like his sister, is also a cat person. (If the original had been titled Cat Person, then Schrader’s remake could have pulled the old Alien/Aliens trick and used the title Cat People, but, alas, it was not to be.)

From here the film follows the broad outlines of the original, but only contains a couple of scenes pulled directly from forty years prior. After showing up in New Orleans, Irene explores the city and finds her way to the local zoo where she encounters zoologist, Oliver (John Heard). Most of the film follows their burgeoning relationship as Irene slowly uncovers her secret past.

(There are a few spoilers in the following paragraph.) In the forty years since the original film, what could be shown and discussed in cinema had clearly changed. It was suggested in the original film that Irene would transform into a panther after having sex and potentially kill her mate, including Oliver who she marries in the original (although it’s suggested that the marriage is never consummated.) Here the rules of being a cat person are slightly more complex. If Irene or her brother have sex, then they will transform into a panther, but they can only transform back after they have taken a life. It’s later revealed that there is one exception: cat people can have sex with relatives and not transform. Paul believes that now that he and his sister have been reunited after all these years, they should run away together. After all, their parents were also brother and sister. (End of major spoilers)

Schrader takes the psychosexual subtext of the original and places it up front and center. According to Wikipedia, John Heard almost turned down the film because he thought it was pornographic. (McDowell also reportedly almost turned down the role, which, if you look at his IMDB page, must have been the only time he has that thought in his entire career. [As of this writing, he has six movies lined up for 2018 alone.] I mean, three years earlier he starred in Caligula.) Kinski spends much of the second half of the film in varying stages of undress. Even the film’s poster makes the explicit nature of the film, referring to the movie as an “Erotic Fantasy.” But none of this seems out of place considering how much many of these themes ran through the original.

It’s not much of a stretch to lump in Cat People with the werewolf craze of the 80s, including An American Werewolf in London, The Howling (and its many sequels), Silver Bullet, and, of course, Teen Wolf one and Too. It makes sense to see these films as reactions to the rise of the Moral Majority political organization, which formed in 1979 and became more prominent during the Reagan administration. Where the Moral Majority wished to police sexuality, werewolf and werecat movies of the time were happy to metaphorically showcase how hidden desires monstrously transform when unaddressed.

Schrader’s attempt to shake up and reveal taboo subconscious thoughts is nicely bolstered by his choice of setting. The original film takes place in New York, but Schrader smartly moves the events to New Orleans, which is emptied of pedestrians giving the city an eerie shroud as if the world around Irene exists only in her mind. Splashes of red and green only highlight the effect. There’s a clear connection between the use of color in Cat People and the neon noir of the 80s, which is fitting because the original film similarly makes use of noir’s chiaroscuro. The film prizes atmosphere and images over tight plotting and only becomes more oneric as the movie somewhat meanders to its conclusion.

Schrader’s Cat People justifies the idea of remakes as more than just a way for a studio to cheaply cash in on name recognition. This 1982 remake takes advantage of the forty year distance as well as Schrader’s unique eye. Paul Schrader came to prominence as a screenwriter with fellow New Hollywood alums, penning Taxi Driver and Raging Bull among many others. And while he’s not a household name like Spielberg and Scorsese, Cat People suggests that he can be a formidable director.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (4/5)

When the first montage hit, I knew Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur film was going to be exactly what I wanted out of a Guy Ritchie King Arthur film. After witnessing the death of his parents, a young Arthur floats down a river, Moses-like, until he’s taken in by a brothel. In quick successive cuts and sped up shots, we see Arthur repeatedly getting the crap kicked out of him, train, get the crap kicked out of him again, train some more, and then start kicking the crap out of others. This wordless couple of minutes doubles as both training montage and character development--this version of Arthur is a rock hardened by the pressures of living in the lowest dregs of society. It also showcases some great visual storytelling that’s becoming increasingly rare in modern blockbuster films that are so often bogged down by exposition.

Hollywood has a long tradition of trying and failing to bring King Arthur to the screen, from the leaden musical Camelot my parents forced me to watch as a kid to the “respectable” 90s version First Knight to the Clive Owen starring film that drained the tale of its myth and magic--you know, all the good parts. The most successful King Arthur films are without a doubt Monty Python’s irreverent take and John Boorman’s surreal Excalibur. On some level, Ritchie imbibed the lesson from these two successful adaptations: if you’re going to tackle an oft told tale like King Arthur, then you’ve got to make it weird.

And the movie opens weird, with Camelot under siege by elephants the size of mountains. An evil mage Mordred has come to claim the lands of Uther Pendragon, but he is defeated by the king. The danger isn’t over, however. Uther’s brother, Vortigern, (here played by Jude Law) stages a coup, killing Uther and his wife, but letting their son Arthur slip away. (Never trust a young Pope).

When we finally meet adult Arthur after the frenetic montage, he’s more concerned with taking the piss out of his buddies and protecting the girls at the brothel than of staging a rebellion. Things change when Uther’s sword, Excalibur, reveals itself after years hidden under the tide. Knowing that Arthur is still out there and still a threat, Vortigern lines up all the men in the kingdom to try out the sword, hoping to uncover the last threat to his kingdom. After Arthur pulls the sword, he’s slated for execution, but the Vortigern resistance snags Arthur and takes him to their hideout in the woods to meet their leader and former Uther ally Bedivere.

The film follows the basic template of “the hero’s journey,” so you can imagine what happens from here. Arthur resists the call before finally meeting his destiny. By eventually accepting his role, he can unlock the powers of Excalibur, which in this version grant Arthur immense power up, like Cloud’s omnislash limit break in Final Fantasy 7 or Mario getting the star if you want to go old school. As with most blockbusters these days, the narrative is set on clearly defined rails, but it’s Ritchie’s flair as a stylist that makes the story work. Ritchie loves to intercut non-chronological sequences, using staccato editing to bounce back and forth in time. When Arthur refuses the call, Bedivere and a newly arrived Merlyn acolyte discuss whether to send Arthur to the “badlands,” a place of giant snakes and bats that would look great as a Manowar album cover. This moment is the katabasis or descent to “hell” portion of the journey, and it’s quickly montaged away at the same time that Bedivere and the mage discuss whether this dangerous journey is a good idea.

It’s this irreverence that elevates the material. Sure enough, King Arthur suffers from many of the problems that persist in fantasy films: a cumbersome backstory and the use of random magic as narrative device. But by quickly shuffling through these necessary but rote elements in the fantasy genre, Ritchie gets the audience straight to the good stuff.

And Ritchie gets plenty of help from others in this romp. His cast has an easy camaraderie with plenty of easy joshing between the characters. (With only a single female character of note, the mage who has only a handful of lines, this is a movie made by dudes about dudes and for dudes.) Jude Law once again reminds us at how damn good he is at chewing scenery. But Ritchie’s biggest ally might be composer Daniel Pemberton, who previously worked with the director on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Instead of solely relying on medieval signifiers in his music, Pemberton makes use of clipped percussion, which perfectly compliments the film’s rapid fire editing. “Growing Up Londinium” treats every sound like a drum, even the shallow breathing that functions as just another instrument.

King Arthur could have been just another Lord of the Rings knockoff, but Ritchie avoids this pitfall by injecting a bit of verve and energy. Sure, he’s influenced by J.R.R. Tolkien, but he’s also pulled in Sergei Eisenstein inspired montages, his early crime films, video games, Schwarzenegger’s Conan the Barbarian, and heavy metal album art. The common complaint against Ritchie as a filmmaker is that he favors style over substance. That might be a legitimate critique if we’re talking about art house cinema, but when it comes to blockbuster filmmaking style over substance is exactly what we should be aiming for. (And if you truly believe there’s lots of substance in today’s superhero saturated marketplace, then you need to get out more). While he started out making indie crime stories, Guy Ritchie might actually be most in his element making sleek, fun blockbusters.

Unfortunately, it looks like King Arthur bombed on its opening weekend, so don’t expect King Arthur 2: Merlyn’s Boogaloo. Perhaps more disappointing is that critics savaged the film despite the fact that it looks and feels different than the unending stream of blockbusters we’ve been getting these days. (Plenty of critics liked to mock the name of one of the film’s major locations, the city of  Londinium, apparently ignorant of the fact that this was the actual name of London starting in 43 AD). Still, let’s hope that Ritchie gets a chance at helming some more big budget films on the studio’s dime. I think up next is the live action Aladdin film about a charismatic, street-smart criminal who becomes royalty. It sounds a little familiar. Anyway, Ritchie’s King Arthur will be heaped upon the open grave of failed franchises, but like the legend itself, I have a feeling it will once again be resurrected...probably on basic cable.

Free State of Jones

Free State of Jones (4/5)

In 1948, Davis Knight was put on trial under Missippi’s miscegenation laws after marrying a white woman, June Lee Spradley. By today’s standards, Knight appeared white, and he passed to the extent that the official marrying Knight and Spradley didn’t even think to ask about Knight’s race. But Knights ancestry hid African blood, and the state of Mississippi eventually brought him to court and were able to return a conviction. In the mid-nineteenth century, his ancestor, Newt Knight, had taken up with a former slave by the name of Rachel, meaning that Davis Knight may have had at least one-eighth African blood, making him black according to Mississippi law. Fortunately, this conviction was overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court. Unfortunately, the overturned conviction rested not on the unconstitutional nature of miscegenation laws, but rather as a means to avoid a challenge to miscegenation laws in the federal courts.

Davis Knight’s incredible story is a shocking example of how race in America was policed by state forces. And yet, the story of his ancestor, Newt Knight is somehow even more improbable. Newt Knight lived in Jones County Mississippi, a poor subsistence farmer in a land ruled by the whims of large plantation owners. He would briefly serve for the Confederacy before going AWOL and leading a band of Anti-Confederate fighters in their resistance against the newly formed government. Director Gary Ross’s film, Free State of Jones tells the story of New Knight as well as Davis Knight, and it’s an important film that stretches our understanding of both the Civil War and its aftermath, Reconstruction. Ross seems intent on bending the traditional Civil War narrative in order to get the viewer to see how the problem of race in America was not settled with the close of the war in 1865.

Newt Knight worked as a medic during the war, and when we first see him, he’s exchanging a wounded soldier’s garb for an officer’s jacket so that the man will be treated more quickly. Already disillusioned with the war, Knight becomes incensed when he discovers the implementation of the Twenty Negro Law, which exempted those who owned twenty slaves or more from military service, making his service part of, as Knight puts it, “a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.”

Knight abandons the army and returns home to his wife and child where he finds that the Confederacy has been seizing a disproportionate number of food and goods for the war effort. After turning guns on some Confederate soldiers to prevent them from taking any more, he flees to the swamps and lives alongside a number of slave maroons.

Knight strikes up a friendship with an escaped slave Moses as well as Rachel, a woman still tied to her plantation, but who manages to smuggle supplies to the escaped slaves. The film treats this as an experience of cross-racial empathy. Not only does Knight live with these escaped slaves, but he also depends on them. Unlike Knight, these men and women are knowledgeable about the swamp, able to navigate its inscrutable waters and wrest food from its harsh corners.

After the battle of Vicksburg, which essentially cleaved the Confederacy in half, more deserters trickle into Jones County, and Knight begins to rally a resistance, a resistance that includes both black and whites. Using guerrilla tactics, Knight and his men eventually wrest Jones County and the surrounding area away from the Confederacy. During this time, he also strikes up a romance with Rachel. (At this point in time, Knight’s wife has fled the county, afraid that her husband’s lawlessness will mean repercussions for her and her child.)

Ross’s film is attempting to reinsert the notion of class into the Civil War narrative. Knight’s journey takes him from a realization that as a poor farmer, he’s being used as fodder to prop up an unjust economic system to the understanding that he has much in common with enslaved blacks of the South. This is not to mean that the plight of the poor white man is just as bad as that of enslaved persons. It certainly wasn’t. And slave narratives at the time from people like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs took pains to make it clear that slavery was a far worse situation than poverty. Still, both Knight and the escaped slaves he’s taken up with are being chewed up by an unjust economic system.

In a pivotal scene, Moses is chastised for taking food that one of Knight’s men believes belongs only to the other whites, not to “n***ers.” Moses responds, “How you ain’t a n***er?” This of course can be read a number of ways. This poor white has also been used by Confederacy, conscripted into a war that does not benefit him. It could also be read as a comment on the illusion of race as a biological category, an absurdity that becomes clear in the film through the intermittent intrusion of Davis Knight’s story.

In a film of this nature, it would make narrative sense to end at the close of the Civil War, perhaps also covering the fact that Knight and Rachel had to flee their home for fear of repercussions, just so that the ending isn’t too “Hollywood.” But nearly the last half hour of the film covers the Civil War’s aftermath and Reconstruction. Moses’s son is taken by a plantation owner as an “apprentice,” a form of slavery that persisted after the Civil War. We also witness the political disenfranchisement and violence blacks faced at the hands of terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.

By extending the narrative, Ross points out the long-term destructive force unleashed by slavery, which was not stopped at Appomattox, at the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, or at the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Like Knight’s descendants, we too are living in the shadow of slavery and the Civil War.

As a filmmaker, Ross is often faulted for being too much of a crowd pleaser, and you can see his desire to make buoyant entertainment in his screenplays for Big and Dave or in his directorial efforts like Seabiscuit. There’s really nothing inherently wrong with this instinct for making an audience happy, but I think critics also forget that Ross also directed the smart and nuanced take on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” Pleasantville. And there’s a real desire on his part in push the Civil War drama forward in the hopes of counteracting the Lost Cause narrative that has infected the public imagination. And in doing so, he plays with the structure of Free State of Jones in unique and interesting ways.

That’s not to say that Free State of Jones is a perfect film. I can’t quite decide if it’s too short or too long. Davis Knight’s story seems essential to what Ross is attempting to accomplish with this film, but his intrusion into the nineteenth-century narrative is sometimes clunky. And while Ross worked with historians to make sure the details of his film were right, by necessity some of history’s weirdness gets sanded down. For instance, by the end of the film, Knight’s first wife comes back to live with him and Rachel, but we don’t really get a sense of what she would have thought about her husband taking up with another woman, especially a former slave. (Although, it is suggested in the film that Knight may have been carrying on a sexual relationship with both women, which the historical record appears to back up).

But Free State of Jones is a timely and necessary film. We live in an age where racism has forced many poor and working class whites to vote against their own interests. And it’s worth remembering that this has historical precedent that goes back generations. In time, I expect the reputation of Free State of Jones to increase. It’s another important film in a string of them that asks us to reexamine nineteenth-century America in order for us to understand how we’ve gotten into the mess we’re currently in.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (3.5/5)

When Disney first announced that they were planning on taking the Star Wars IP (ugh) and submitting it to the Marvel model, where they produce one or more films a year, I was skeptical. As someone who grew up watching the original trilogy on TV and VHS, I felt there was something special about Star Wars, something that differentiated it from other big franchises. Sure, there were plenty of Star Wars material floating around outside of the main “Episodes”: comic books, novels, cartoons, video games, and even a soundtrack unencumbered by an actual film. And there’s been plenty of detritus within Star Wars, including terribly written novels, those Ewok movies, and the godawful holiday special. But these were easy to ignore because they weren’t meant to be experienced on the big screen. By pumping out a film every year, I reasoned, Disney was diminishing what made the experience of seeing a new Star Wars movie in theaters special.

The first of Disney’s anthology films, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (okay, they’re still sticking with that subtitle), does a fine job of justifying the practice, even if it doesn’t completely quell my worries that the Disney machine will grind Star Wars to dust in order to suck out every last cent. The plot of Rogue One is extrapolated from a line from the original film, and the movie recycles much of the aesthetic, character motivation, and even the macguffin from A New Hope. Jyn Erso, the film’s protagonist, is a lapsed rebel who now finds herself jailed by the Empire. She’s broken out of a labor camp in order to aid the Rebellion. As a child, Jyn’s mother was killed and her father was pressed into service by the Empire to help build the Death Star, which means this is the fourth film featuring some version of the original superweapon.

But what the Rebellion really needs her for is to make contact with Saw Gerrera, a rebel extremist who leads a guerrilla cell on the planet of Jedha (for some reason the film flashes names of locations in the bottom corner of the screen like we’re watching a Jack Ryan thriller). Gerrera has come into possession of information regarding the Empire’s new superweapon. Jyn, her handler, Cassian Andor, and his surly droid, K2SO follow these breadcrumbs all the way the film’s impressive third act. Along the way they pick up a motley crew, including Imperial defector Bodhi Rook and odd couple Chirrut Îmwe, a Zatoichi archetype, and Baze Malbus.

Most of the characters are quickly sketched, which isn’t necessarily a problem. In the great superhero tradition, Baze Malbus is defined by that massive gun he totes around while his friend Chirrut Îmwe is mostly defined by actor Donnie Yen’s beatific smile. Jyn, played by Felicity Jones, serves as the main character, but her story arc seems incomplete, like a Jenga puzzle threatening to topple because of its missing parts. At one point she must give a rousing speech to the troops, mostly because she’s the protagonist, so of course she does. But Jones’s prim Britishness can’t quite sell the dialogue, and it makes you appreciate Jennifer Lawrence’s conviction to deliver whatever hokum was necessary in those Hunger Games movies.

Part of me wants to snark on Disney’s four-quadrant, tentpole filmmaking, but another part of me has to acknowledge that this film is the product of a well-oiled machine. Director Gareth Edwards nimbly directs the action, and the quips are delivered right on time. The antagonism between Jyn and K2SO provides one of the film’s chief delights. And when the movie turns into the Star Wars version of The Dirty Dozen, it’s easy to lose yourself in the spectacle. Rogue One contains a number of striking imagery of imagined planets and environments that the series is known for.

**SPOILERS AHEAD** And yet, I still felt like the movie never came together like it could have. I love the idea of making a Star Wars movie in the direct mold of those WWII movies from the 50s and 60s, but the need to connect this to A New Hope continually threatens to undermine Rogue One. The Easter eggs come at a regular clip. Some of these make sense. It’s great to see Bail Organa working with the Rebellion, and the glass of blue milk in the opening scene is an unobtrusive nod to Luke’s favorite drink on Tatooine. But do we really need to see Evazan and Ponda Baba bump into Jyn? (For those who weren’t into the habit of tracking down the names of obscure Star Wars characters in their youth, these are the dude with the messed up face and the walrus-looking fellow who pick a fight with Luke in Mos Eisley’s Cantina. Ponda Boba’s arm sees the wrong end of Obi-Wan’s lightsaber.) And while Darth Vader’s inclusion makes sense up to a point, the tacked on ending that connects the film unambiguously to A New Hope seems unnecessary and superfluous, as if Disney felt the audience wouldn’t realize these are the same Death Star plans mentioned in A New Hope. If anything, it undercuts the arc of the characters we’ve been following for two hours by reminding us that they’re just minor people in the grand scheme. Finally, I’m flummoxed by the inclusion of a creepy CGI version of Peter Cushing’s Tarkin. I’m sure there are sexagenarian actors who bear a resemblance to Cushing with the aid of the makeup department. Seriously, the image of CG Cushing is more ghoulish than anything found in those Hammer Horror films he starred in.

**SPOILERS CONTINUED** It’s nearly impossible to discuss your reaction to Rogue One without spending some time discussing the ending, so there are some even more ruinous spoilers in this paragraph. You were warned. Above, I likened this film to Star Wars’s Dirty Dozen, but this film attempts to one up that trash classic because no one survives. Every major character meets their end in the final assault, and Jyn and Cassian die while standing ankle deep in the ocean as a mushroom cloud balloons in the background, an image beautifully cribbed from the film noir classic Kiss Me Deadly. I’ve gone back and forth between admiring this ending for its ability to smuggle such a bleak conclusion into a major blockbuster and thinking that the film never really earns this downer of a conclusion. Part of the problems is that following our heroes’ demise, there’s a coda that sees the Death Star plans make their way to a CGI Leia, unnecessarily connecting the dots between Rogue One and A New Hope and undermining the journey of the characters we’ve been following for two hours. The film never quite captures the acidic cynicism as The Dirty Dozen. It wants to be a gritty war film, but one that’s still fun for the family.

*SPOILERS CONTINUING* Additionally, I’m not sure the film ever really earns these deaths. There’s plenty of posturing in Rogue One about the kinds of sacrifices rebels must make in order to bring about change, but this is never really shown or discussed. I believe blockbuster movies can engage with complex topics, but there’s a difference between motioning towards complexity and actually engaging with complexity. (As an example, this difference can be seen in The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises in which the former actually has something to say about terrorism where the latter’s attempt at broaching the topic of economic inequality is simply laughable). Earlier I mentioned The Dirty Dozen, but where that film gleefully deconstructs “the good war,” Rogue One never has the gumption to really show us these supposed ethical quandaries.

*SPOILERS ENDING*

The big argument over Rogue One will likely be about whether or not the film is better than The Force Awakens. You could go back and forth on this question, outlining diagrams on the wall until they take you to a padded cell. I found them to be on the same level. When both films are working properly, they’re the kind of blockbuster entertainment spectacle that we go to the movies for. But they keep making unforced errors. The Force Awakens kills all momentum when Death Star 3.0 enters center stage. Rogue One likewise suffers when it bends over backwards to acknowledge the original trilogy or smuggle in a hero’s journey when the war film genre really should revolve around an ensemble cast. And while I like to avoid nitpicking, I think the inclusion of Peter CGIushing is simply unconscionable. Both films are good if ultimately unambitious. But I think Rogue One at least proves there’s some stock in the idea of creating anthology films. I just hope Disney figures out that not every film needs to tie directly into dialogue or characters from the original trilogy. It’s a big galaxy, after all. Let’s do something new.

Cat People

Cat People (1942) (4.5/5)

Cat People begins like a traditional romance with a couple that meets cute at a local zoo. Having trouble sketching the likeness of a black panther, Irena keeps on throwing away her unsatisfactory attempts but each time misses the trash can. Another zoogoer, Oliver Reed. disposes of her trash and jokingly chastises her. But after they strike up a conversation, this Oliver fellow seems less concerned that one of Irena’s sketches, a badass image of a panther skewered on a sword, has slipped from her sketchbook and is left to muss up the city zoo. (This is before the EPA existed, so I guess people were a little looser about these things). Because we know this is a horror film, we also know that this relationship may not end well, and Cat People could be categorized as a horror-romance in the tradition of early gothic novels, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, or later horror films like The Fly or Let the Right One In.

Irena and Oliver strike up a romance and eventually get married. It’s not clear how long they were dating before marriage, but in the film it goes by quickly. It doesn’t seem as if Oliver knows much about his bride before marriage, except that she’s has a deep connection to her Serbian roots. In her apartment there’s a statue of “King John” regally atop a horse with his sword held straight up impaling a large cat-like creature. This isn’t Magna Carta King John, as Oliver first guesses; it’s actually Jovan Nenad, a sixteenth-century Serbian military commander who established the last independent Serbian state prior to the takeover by the Ottoman Empire. According to Irena, her village was captured by the Mamluk people, and soon after, the villagers started practicing witchcraft, which gave them the ability to turn into cat creatures. King John retook the village and killed those cat people who didn’t flee into the neighboring wilderness.

Although my knowledge of Eastern European history is hardly encyclopedic, you can probably guess from the description Irena gives us that the King John was a Christian who drove out the Muslim Mamluks. (In fact, the Mamluks were a slave warrior caste that likely inspired George RR Martin’s The Unsullied). Like plenty of horror stories, Cat People is about fear of contamination. Irena symbolizes the immigrant to the United States who may not be as white and Christian as you think. The mismatch between Irena and her husband is further highlighted by Oliver Reed’s absurdly Anglo sounding name.

Over time, Irena comes to fear that she herself is contaminated and may be one of the cat people. Another Serbian woman who bares a striking resemblance to a cat approaches Irena during her engagement dinner and speaks to her in her native tongue, calling her “sister.” According to legend, if a cat person kisses someone, she will transform into a cat and eat her mate. Cat People was made after the implementation of the Motion Picture Production Code, which established strict censorship over Hollywood cinema, so the film can’t say this in so many words, but for the audience it’s pretty clear what kissing means in this context. In fact, Oliver even says something along the lines of, “You know, it’s kind of weird we’re married and all and we haven’t ‘kissed’ yet.”

Here it becomes clear the film also embodies the fear of female sexuality as well as racial difference. Even after he marries Irena, Oliver keeps up a flirtatious friendship with his coworker, Alice Moore, who expresses doubt early on about the viability of Oliver’s marriage. Like early film star and sex symbol, Rudolph Valentino, Irena’s appeal comes from her darker complexion, which marks her as distinct from her blonde rival Alice. (Although he was Italian, Valentino also played Muslims, such as the title character in The Son of the Sheik). When Oliver, Irena, and Alice go on a museum trip, Alice should feel like the third wheel, but in fact Oliver suggests Irena explore other parts of the building because unlike him and Alice, she must be bored with these English ship models they’re looking at. The implication, of course, is that Irena is racially, religiously, and culturally unsuited for Oliver.

Irena starts to become concerned that Oliver and Alice are having an affair, and at first it appears that the film is setting up Irena to be a paranoiac. When Oliver’s having a late night at the office, she tracks down her husband only to find him having a meal with Alice. She later stalks Alice late at night down starkly lit streets. This scene in particular is masterfully crafted, juxtaposing the sound of Irena and Alice’s increasingly frantic footsteps and ratcheting up tension until it is broken by the sound of a bus arriving at its stop. Anyone who has watched a horror film is familiar with the scene where we expect the killer to jump out of the shadows, but instead a friendly character or a cat jumps out instead. The technique apparently dates back to Cat People and is known as the Lewton Bus after producer Val Lewton. There’s also a scene where Alice jumps into a pool in order to escape from a large cat she’s convinced is stalking her, and I’m pretty certain this moment in the film inspired a similar scene in the indie horror film It Follows.

But Irena isn’t as crazy as she’s initially made out to be. In fact, Oliver is planning to leave his wife for Alice, and even gets the advice to annul the marriage, which is another indicator that the marriage was never consummated. In all honesty, Oliver is kind of a dick. I mean, dude, you married this woman who you barely knew and then won’t step up when she’s clearly having a difficult time. What’s more, you’re ready to jump ship now that times are tough.

That’s not to say that Oliver doesn’t try to help out his wife, but he does so in arguably the wrong ways. He’s convinced that Irena’s cat person fears are only in her head, so he sends her to a psychiatrist. [Be warned. There are spoilers ahead]. When watching the film, I felt like there was something off about this psychiatrist dude. It turns out, like Irena’s cat people phobia, this wasn’t just in my head. The guy’s kind of a creep, and at the end of the film, he tries to kiss Irena, which I don’t think would be looked kindly on by the APA. Until this moment, we’re not quite certain whether Irena’s cat people fears are legitimate or not, but sure enough, she transforms into a leopard and mauls her therapist.

It’s easy to see why Cat People has become a horror film classic. First off, director Jacques Tourneur drapes the film in shadows, a technique he would use in the film noir classic, Out of the Past. (If you ever wanted to watch Robert Mitchum walk into a room and knock out some schlub with just one punch, then you really should watch Out of the Past). Oliver works for an architecture agency, so Tourneur makes great use of underlit drafting tables to create incredibly stark, nearly abstract chiaroscuro. Second, the film is thematically rich. From issues of hybridity, race, religion, immigration, science and medievalism, Cat People contains a whole host of themes in its brisk seventy-three minute running time.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to reduce Cat People down to a single message. While it certainly embodies America’s fear of the other as present in our anxiety over immigration, it also seems more sympathetic towards Irena than not. After all, the men in the film, her husband and therapist, ultimately fail her. She’s a monster, but she’s also the character who’s easiest to identify with. It’s not surprising that producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur, both of whom are immigrants, would take the point of view of Irena, and it’s unfortunately not surprising that the film’s exploration of America’s fear of immigrants who come from the Muslim world remains timely nearly seventy-five years later.

Hell or High Water

Hell or High Water (5/5)

Because of its ability to reflect many of America’s founding American myths, the Western genre has become inherently political. Whether it’s High Noon’s examination of civic duty and community or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’s look into the shaky line between judicial and extra-judicial violence, the Western seems to automatically circle back to questions of nationhood, politics, and economics. It’s clear early on that the bank bailout and Great Recession weighs on the mind of David Mackenzie, director of Hell or High Water, a modern day Western.

Hell or High Water begins with an impressive 360 degree pan of a small West Texas town, and we can make out some graffiti that says something along the lines of “Three tours in Iraq, where’s my bailout.” Mackenzie’s camera likes to linger along rusted out industry and those predatory advertisements for home loans you can find in depressed areas. The movie starts off with two bank robberies perpetrated by two brothers, Toby and Tanner Howard (Chris Pine expanding his career beyond summer spectacles and Ben Foster cementing himself as an important character actor). The two have been crossing the state robbing banks, only taking loose bills from the cashier till to make sure their gains are untraceable. They also rob only branches of Midlands banks.

You can probably piece together from this description that Midlands bank has screwed over the brothers’ family, and they’re extracting money in return. In this case, their late mother, suffering from some sort of illness, was forced into taking out a reverse mortgage under conditions she could not reasonably repay, which has delivered the family land into the hands of Midlands. The brothers plan on paying off their debt with the bank’s own money.

One of the many joys of the film is its refusal to bend to the familiar molds of the genre (which is only possible because screenwriter Taylor Sheridan is already minutely familiar with the heist and Western genres). For instance, of the two brothers, Tanner is clearly unhinged, but this doesn’t lead to the dissolution of their relationship or other obvious plot points. There’s an unspoken bond, or perhaps a bond spoken through the male language of quips and insults, that the two brothers will forgive each other for just about any slight or mistake.

This brotherly relationship is mirrored by the two Texas Rangers on their tale, Marcus and Alberto, played respectively by Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham. Bridges is as charismatic as ever, even if he has become less intelligible the more he stars in Westerns (in a few years expect him to turn in a performance composed entirely of grunts). Throughout Marcus chides Alberto, the insults themselves are usually aimed at his Comanche heritage. Just as with the brothers, these insults are a means to both cloak and convey affection. The film divides our loyalties evenly. We know we should side with the lawmen, but you can’t help and hope the brothers make it through with their plan.

One of the film’s centerpieces happens to be its dialogue. We’re given a few glimpses into the history of these characters, but their interactions with one another more clearly define these people than their backstories. (It’s become something of a lost art in film to develop characterization through choices and dialogue rather than a tragic backstory crammed into the story with the grace of a backhoe loader). The film is both confident enough to take little detours with side characters and yet eager enough to please to make these conversations fun for the audience. Some of the best lines of the film are actually given to two waitresses who have three scenes between them.

The politics of the film are clear, but there’s enough nuance here to make sure the message is more than window dressing. Hell and High Water is about banks screwing over the working class, but it’s also about intergenerational poverty and how streams of wealth flows away from the poor and working class. The film isn’t just about inequality; it’s about how inequality is produced by squeezing capital from those at the bottom into the maw of those at the top. During the course of the film we see the beautiful southwestern landscape alongside dried up towns, places where one character openly wonders how anyone makes a living there.

Hell and High Water delivers as an immensely entertaining genre flick in a year full of immensely entertaining genre flicks. (Those summer blockbusters may have let you down in 2016, but if you move down to low and mid-budget movies, then there have been some real treats). The film smartly handles the issues of inequality and the evaporating middle class, but even many years from now, when we live in a Star Trek-like utopia where money no longer exists, Hell and High Water will still entertain as a top tier modern day Western.