Sunday

Before midnight last night we watched Cat People (1942),* the first two-person October Marathon screening. Irena has recently moved to a large American metropolis from her mountain village in Serbia, and she spends her afternoons working up sketches of local fauna for a fashion magazine. In this case, the beasts drawing her turn out to be the caged zoo leopards around the corner from her house. She is a self-sufficient, sociable young woman, but she carries a strange burden: her people are descended from witch stock driven into hiding during the middle ages. She's pretty sure that, were she to let her emotions take control, enjoy even a single euphemistic kiss, she would become a panther and wreak helpless, fatal havoc. Her new husband doesn't agree, and neither does his smarmy psychologist: both selflessly volunteer to prove her wrong. Beautiful direction by Jacques Tourneur plays up the shadows of animals in everyday life. Later, after midnight, I rounded off this Saturday's double-feature with Isle of the Dead (1945).* Pherides is a cagey, if rather severe, Greek general on the front lines during the Balkan Revolution. During an interview with an American reporter, he waxes nostalgic about his late wife, and their happier days together. She happens to be buried on an ancient island nearby, so they cross the battlefield to make a midnight visit. Along the way the general narrates the future WWI backdrops: war, famine, death, and etc.--there have been cases of septicemic plague in the trenches. After finding their way to the cemetery island they discover all the tombs have been robbed, so they knock on the door of the local Swiss archeologist's house searching for answers. What they find is more plague, ancient superstition, and maddening quarantine with a motley cast of strange bedfellows. [Cavin]