First thing’s first: I’m going to get my digression out of the way.
As a young girl training at conservatory, the future famous opera singer Maria Callas used to sit and listen to all of the other singing students, many of them mediocre, during their lessons. She said that you could learn something even from the mistakes and foibles of other voices.
I offer this anecdote in order to rationalize my love of endearingly crude or creaky movies.
Yeah, like I need an excuse. Because, c’mon, people, it’s not like human beings got a whole lot more discerning and sophisticated in the past 60 years. We, the smug spectators of the 2010s, may prefer to think that we can savor a silliness and “camp” factor that those naïve ancestors of the 1940s couldn’t, but I don’t believe it for a moment. Those cynical, hard-working citizens of another era probably reacted with the same amusement as we do to absurd plot holes and exaggerated acting. They might not have understood what “snark” and “camp” meant, but they would’ve experienced them, I am sure. And it’s condescending to them to pretend otherwise.
Yeah, even your Red Cross Girl grandma would’ve found this silly.
Which begs the question, why did people go to watch a movie like The Catman of Paris? What pleasure can we derive from watching it?
10. Because it’s so very French, non?
I have never, in all of my years of obsessing over Hollywood films, seen a movie in which the name Charles is consistently pronounced in the French manner, “Shaaaaah-le,” like this one.
Charles: “Mon Dieu! I seem to be souffring from some étrange maladie!”
Which is really funny, since the accents in The Catman of Paris range from the genuinely French to the vaguely European to dodgy Pépé-Le-Pewe approximations to not-even-trying. The Inspector, primarily, speaks most of his lines in a flat American drawl, but has to say the names all Frenchy-like. Just listen to him try to do the R-in-the-back-of-the-throat that frustrates every beginning French student.
“I am sorry, Monsieur. You’ll have to take that up with another fonctionnaire.”
At one point a character tries to convince another to hide out, saying, “If you fall into the hands of the bloodhound Sévéren…!” Every phrase is so flowery and blustery that there’s really a hidden “Sacre Bleu!” in each line. Oh, did I mention that there’s also a Can-Can dance and cafés? Vive la France!
9. Quite good special effects makeup.
Not, say, Jack Piece good, but Bob Mark, the makeup supervisor, did a fine job on this and many other films (one thinks of the soulful, heavy, fuzzed-out eyeliner look he brought to Maureen O’Hara in Rio Grande). Mark serves up an appropriately grotesque creature in the titular catman.
8. If you don’t have the time to read Penny Dreadfuls…
The picturesque quality of the mise-en-scene ensures that the whole movie resembles a Belle Époque engraving full of pointy-nosed maidens, idyllic gardens, and trim carriages. Only, every now and then, there’s a catman and a brutal murder.
This decorative frilliness combined with a monster on the loose recalls the “penny dreadfuls” of the 19th century. Like penny dreadfuls, Poverty Row horrors aren’t particularly well done, but they do sell thrills and a fussy, poor man’s Gothic ambiance that comforts as much as it scares.
7. Hey, didn’t I see him in…?
If you regularly watch Republic programmer pictures (I am Nitrate Diva and I am a Nexflix-aholic…) you start to feel like you’re going to an old repertory theater. The guy who was the murderer last week is the victim in the new production. The trampy girlfriend of the last picture plays the wife in the next one. In other words, there’s a whole extra-diegetic thrill of identifying the actor.
I admit that this sounds pretty film geeky, but even so, I would be surprised if people from the 1940s didn’t whisper to their companions, “Hey, didn’t I see him in…?”
The watching process includes a memory game—not unlike the license plate game, but with actors. Despite everything we learn in film class about absorption and identification, the classic Hollywood spectator would have discovered their own ways of playing with a movie. They would have, I hypothesize, enjoyed recognizing the same little-known actors just as much as we do today—if #TCMParty is any indicator.
Keep an eye out for Dourglass Dumbrille (what a name!) as Borchard. You’ll definitely recognize him from a much more prestigious (though not much better) film—The Ten Commandments. And you might also recognize faux-French Lenore Aubert, the lady in distress in Catman of Paris, as the would-be vampiress seducer of Bud Abbott in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein!
6. Because the plot is just too weird to pass up on.
A reincarnated catman who’s existed since before the birth of Christ? Check.
A monster movie about—seriously—publishing? Uh-huh.
A secret trial overheard by a guy… in cat form? Yup, the plot hinges on it.
This is whacky stuff. Don’t miss out on the sheer oddball joy of it all.
5. Nutty dialogue…
A sample: “Governments are like women. They weep and they pout and they threaten, but the more you scorn them, the more they respect you!”
“Charles, stop treating me like a government!”
Hey, U.S. Gov—your crocodile tears don’t fool me one bit. I’m giving you the silent treatment for a while. How you like me now, Uncle Sam?
4. Because it was made by mega Western director Lesley Selander.
“Yeehaaah!” Wait, I mean, “Allez! Allez!”
Selander directed over 100 films in his career, many of them programmer Westerns. He’d worked with John Ford and W.S. “One-Take Woody” Van Dyke. In other words, he was kind of a dyed-in-the-wool buckaroo guy.
Knowing this fact, The Catman of Paris comes across totally differently, because you can tell that the director is doing what works for him. That is to say, he includes a lot of Western-style action stuff. In 1896 Paris. Quite a combo there.
Really, there’s this great five-minute-long brawl between a whole bunch of unemployed artists and our main character—a novelist. They just drop their conversations about art and life and start knocking each other around! Leaping off of bars. Falling on top of tables. Throwing chairs. Um, French artists will scream at the top of their lungs in defense of their famous authors, but they’d be damned if they spilled a drop of café au lait while doing it, which is why this brawl is so very funny.
“How DARE you say that about Baudelaire?”
Then there’s a carriage chase, which somebody copied and pasted from Selander’s last 40s Western. Hey, switch the stagecoaches for French fiacres—you’ve got a horror chase! I was still expecting the cavalry to show up, though.
Basically, what we’ve got here, is a horror with the tropes of a Western. How often do you get to say that?
3. Because this was the 1940s standard for violence?
As I’ve said, I don’t think our mid-century, War-Bond-buying forebears were immune to the kind of snide humor that continues to tickle us today. Nevertheless, I would argue that their tolerance for violence in film does not match our own. Even if you fought at the Battle of the Bulge, movie violence might shock you if you possess little experience with it. Movie violence often doesn’t look like real-life violence, it’s much bigger if it happens on a big screen, and we also have the hidden question in our minds: “Am I supposed to enjoy this?”
And, for 1946, Catman would’ve been considered quite bloody. In fact, I’ve read a review from the L.A. Times in which the critic has little to say about it except that it gives a few good chills and has “very violent effects.”
So, take a little vacation from blood spatter, and try to put yourself into a frame of mind to accept blood trailing down a woman’s décolleté as truly horrific. The gore you love will seem extra-gory when you return to it.
2. Because you’ll delight in a few clever stylistic touches…
Although they mostly involve cats or shadows.
1. Umm… am I the only one picking up on the serious homoerotic subtext here?
Do note that some spoilers lurk in this reason.
How often do you get to see a man slap another man in movies? Our main character, Charles, a best-selling writer, spends most of his time hanging out with his “patron,” Borchard.
We first see them both together as men about town, having dinner, just the two of them. Later, when Charles stops off at what appears to be his home, we hear Borchard call his name from off-screen and then see the patron cozily installed at a desk. So, they live together?
Things really get awkward when Charles falls in love. We get scenes of the amnesiac Charles, who thinks he might be the catman, depending on the advice and help of Borchard while Charles’ girlfriend remains on the fringes, an interloper in the relationship. When Charles grows hysterical Borchard bitchslaps him! There’s something not quite professional about that relationship.
Turns out, Borchard is the Catman (Yes, goo, goo, g’joob!) and has devised a scheme to kill off everyone who stands in the way of Charles’ path to literary immortality. In other words, Borchard kills for Charles. Psychotic love alert!
Two’s company—and three’s a foule!
In that case, The Catman of Paris is richer than it seems. The idea of embedding a supernatural animal-man in the context of a homoerotic relationship adds a layer of interest to the story. I wonder, would the 40s audience have picked up on that? At the very least, I’m sure that they could intuit some of it—which makes even a silly movie like this one worth watching.
Nitrate Diva 