Serbian expat Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) meets cute with marine engineer Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) while she sketches a black leopard in Manhattan's Central Park Zoo. When Irena invites Oliver back her apartment for tea, he notes a statue of a man on horseback impaling a large cat with a sword. Irena explains that it's a depiction of King John of Serbia, and the cat symbolizes evil. She then recounts a legend from her village that says the formerly Christian villagers resorted to witchcraft after being subjugated into slavery by the Mamaluk hordes during the medieval era. Upon driving out the invaders and seeing the diabolical change the villagers wrought upon themselves, King John had the villagers executed, but "the wisest and the most wicked" escaped into the mountains and spread across the globe. Oliver brushes the legend off as simple foreign superstition, but Irena could not be more serious about it being an irrefutable truth. More to the point, Irena believes she is descended from those "cat people," and her behaviors serve to underscore her belief. Nonetheless the two being dating and Oliver buys Irena a kitten as a present. The kitten recoils in fear upon meeting Irean, so it is exchanged at the pet store for a bird. Alone with the bird, Irena toys with it like a cat would, and, since it is in a cage and cannot escape, the bird dies from sheer fright.
"I tawt I taw a puddy tat...AAAAAGGGHHK!!!
After a whirlwind romance, Irena and Oliver marry, but there's a major snag: Irena refuses to consummate the marriage, out of fear that any arousal of passion will transform her into a feline apex predator, specifically a black leopard.
Following the nupitals, the newlyweds dine at a Serbian restaurant, where Irena catches the eye of a spooky Eastern European woman who approaches her and says, with more than a hint of sad melancholy, "Moja sestra," or "my sister," in Serbian.
Understandably frustrated, Oliver urges Irena to see his friend, Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), a psychiatrist, in hope that therapy will cure Irena's superstition and fear of intimacy. Dr. Judd is a bit of a creeper who's none too subtle about his desire for Irena, but despite her legs being as closed as the vault at Fort Knox, she loves Oliver, so she fucks off out of Judd's office. But the pussy drought drags on, and Oliver's affections soon turn to his sweet office mate, Alice Moore (Jane Randolph), an all-American gal type who professes her long-simmering love to him. Though their encounters are strictly platonic, the attraction between Oliver and Alice grows, which does not go unnoticed by Irena. With a love triangle in place, with the added element of a lustful psychiatrist and and accent of the lethally supernatural, things get weird. Alice is twice stalked by an unseen and large feline presence, memorably in a sequence involving a swimming pool, and Irena makes a return visit to Dr. Judd's office, where the question of her shapeshifting heritage is answered in no uncertain terms.
The famous pool sequence.
Jacques Tourneur's CAT PEOPLE may the first of the great American sound horror pictures released outside of the Universal cycle, and it is a taut and eerie study in mood and atmosphere. Its kill count is low, as the narrative is more about examining the fear of intimacy and letting us get to know and understand its characters than providing us with straight-up shocks. It's basically a film noir of its era, albeit one featuring the supernatural in lieu of gangsters and gumshoes, and its gene-splicing of that genre with the flavor of the golden age of movie horror is an interesting flavor indeed. Though in no way explicit, its material is more adult than one would expect for a work of its vintage (as well as one made under the constraints of the Hays Code), and star Simone Simon smolders as the sultry Irena, who exudes a bewitching and eerie "foreignness" as she struggles with her love for Oliver while denying him (and herself) sexual gratification.
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