"Cat People"

I'd been meaning to catch Jacques Torneur's horror/noir classic for years, but finally watched it last night. This movie does a masterful job of creating a supernatural monster that you pretty much never see. (A woman recently immigrated to the US is descended from a satanic cult whose members turn into jungle cats when angered. You see her shadow and hear a cat snarling, but that's pretty much it.) This felt as much like a pre-WWII European movie as a Hollywood studio film. I love European emigre directors in Hollywood like Torneur, Max Ophuls, Billy Wilder, and all the rest. And while Cat People works wonderfully as a suspense tale, it also is a terrific allegory for America naively thinking it can straighten out Europe's problems. The only problem with this film is I kept getting that awful Randy Newman song "Short People" in my head, only with "Cat People" substituted in, of course.