“Even, and especially, when American texts
are not 'about' African presences or characters or narratives or idiom, the shadow
hovers in implication, in sign, in line of demarcation.”
--- Toni Morrison
In this paper, I would like to explore the racial themes in two of Jacques Tourneur’s films, Cat People (1942) and Out of the Past (1947). Cat People was produced by Val Lewton. He was known for producing significant B-list movies in which the element of horror comes second, and it is the shock of the supernatural and the suggestion of horror which the viewers should be looking out for (Hoberman). 5 years later, Tourneur directed Out of the Past, which at one point was hailed as “one of the finest examples of film noir in Hollywood’s history.” (Scruggs 97) The film noir shares the same cinematographer with Cat People - the brilliant Nicholas Muscara. Though Out of the Past abandons the tale of the supernatural, its story of a man on the hunt for a woman creates a narrative reminiscent of a slave catcher chasing a runaway (98).
Tourneur had long since played with racial themes in his movies before directing Out of the Past. It is apparent for most that the title of the film refers to Jeff Markham’s past coming back to haunt him, but Charles Scruggs in Out of the Black Past: The Image of the Fugitive Slave in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past posits that the presence of Kathie Moffat in the film calls attention to a veiled narrative that is the coded tale of the fugitive slave, told through indirection and nuance (98). Jeff can be seen as a slave catcher who has failed to complete his mission of capturing Kathie. The “plantation” owner would then be Whit Sterling, who wants Kathie to be back in his “pasture.” (99) At one point in the movie, Whit alludes to his desire of wanting Kathie back by telling Jeff about a horse he bought and put in “a nice, green pasture.” (99)
The theory that Kathie is somehow directly related to the hidden presence of race in the film can be proven in a scene at the Harlem nightclub where Jeff visits to talk to Kathie’s African American maid, Eunice Leonard. (99) Scruggs rejects the distinction Paula Robinowitz had made between Kathie and Eunice, that Kathie can “get away with it” and “flee to Acapulco” because she’s a white woman who “double crosses white men” Eunice, on the other hand, cannot (99). Scruggs remarks that Kathie did not get away with anything. At the end of the movie, Kathie had died with Jeff, confined by her past as he is.
Kathie’s narrative is ostensibly missing from this movie. As Out of the Past draws near to an end, Kathie tells Jeff this: “I want to start over again and tell you things I never told you before.” Sadly, she never gets the chance to do so, but it is this untold story that becomes the heart of the film. Director Jacques Tourneur was especially vocal about his refusal to make a caricature out of black life for “comic effect.” (99) He said in an interview with Positif magazine:
“I’ve always tried to give them a profession, to have them speak normally without drawing any comic effect… Watch in Out of the Past the scene in the nightclub where there are only black people, look at the way they are dressed and filmed, the elegance of the young woman in responding to Mitchum.” (Tourneur qtd. in Fujiwara 92)
Scruggs notes that Eunice’s “elegance” in the scene creates a doubling effect (99). Her fashionable wardrobe, her quick wit, her slightly coquettish manner with Jeff - this portrait mirrors Kathie’s behavior toward Jeff (100). Both femme fatale know exactly the ways to manipulate a man who represents a threat to them. Eunice also foreshadows Kathie’s first appearance in the film as she walks into the Acapulco cafe. Jeff’s “repressed past” is brought into the light by Nicholas Musuraca’s marvelous cinematography (100). James Naremore made an excellent observation: “Her light clothing makes her almost invisible on the brilliant plaza, but when she steps into the room she seems to materialize out of the brightness, becoming first a silhouette and then a visible figure against a shaded wall.” The word “invisible” may refer to Jeff’s own inability to perceive Kathie clearly as she is in the entire film (100). Scruggs also made the suggestion that Kathie’s physical fluidity described in Naremore’s words proposes the theory that Eunice is the base of Kathie’s character (100). They are sisters under the skin.
One can say that the Harlem nightclub scene is gratuitous. Its function within the detective story is close to null. Yet it symbolizes the director’s attempt to create an identification with and sympathy for Kathie that goes beyond the movie’s moral code (100). When Jeff enters the black nightclub, he changes his role from an urban detective to a slave catcher (100). This moment suggests to the audience an historical context outside the film. As the audience watches, Eunice implies that Kathie left Whit because of physical abuse (“she got pushed around”). This impression of Kathie is at odds with Jeff’s forced story on Ann where he intends Kathie to be a bad and dangerous woman. Scruggs makes the link that physical abuse, as suffered by Kathie, is also a common reason that leads slaves to kill or leave their masters (100). Whit’s abuse toward Kathie is corroborated when Jeff asks Kathie, “Did it take much persuasion to make you say I killed Fisher? C’mon feed my ego. Tell me he beat you.” The following scene tells the audience that Whit did indeed strike her. Not only that, he threatened to kill her if she doesn’t take the blame for Fisher’s demise: “when it comes it still won’t be quick and it won’t be pretty.”
Jeff’s position as he was interrogating Eunice creates some sort of visual ambiguity (101). A halo of light is shining on Eunice and her boyfriend who are both sitting down and looking up at the hardboiled detective standing almost in silhouette with his back towards the camera. This scene, Scruggs proposes, denotes that there are myriad shades of “blackness” in Out of the Past (101). The mise en scene also implies that Jeff, as a white man, has failed to take control of his own narrative and his presence is less omniscient than Kathie’s absence (101). It seems like Eunice and her boyfriend are trying to protect Kathie as though she is really black too. The couple has agreed beforehand to lie if anyone were to approach and ask about Kathie’s whereabouts. The doubling effect in this scene links Kathie and Eunice as women and as “noir” as well - Eunice literally while Kathie figuratively so (101).
This doubling of Kathie and Eunice remains noticeable throughout the film. Kathie’s ultimate mystery is that we never get to hear her “story,” linking her with black women like Eunice who appears only to drive the narrative forward (102). Jeff, the “slave catcher,” manipulates the story of Kathie (the “slave”) for much of the film (102). He intends everyone, especially his current partner, good old Ann, to perceive Kathie as deadly. Even when Ann says that Kathie “can’t be all bad. No one is,” Jeff responds with, “Well, she comes the closest.”
Scruggs uses Hazel V. Carby’s essay on black female blues singers and James Baldwin’s saying, the “Negro experience of life” to characterize Kathie’s tragic precariousness in the film. She improvises when she finds herself in tough situations (104). It makes her seem mysterious because we never know what she is thinking. One iconic example of how her mysteriousness is shown to the audience is through the majestic use of lightning on the set. The chiaroscuro lightning had split Kathie’s face in two: black and white when Jeff catches her in the act of framing him for the murder of Leonard Eels (104). Her gleaming eyes, bright diamond earrings, the white light that bounces nicely off her fur coat - this is the “white” Kathie whom every woman wishes they are like (104). Everyone is vouching for the “black” Kathie, though. The one who escapes Tar Baby with her quick wit and sweet-talking. But thinking on her feet can only take her so far. It’s just as Jeff muses, “I never saw her in the daytime. We seemed to live by night.” This “night” image of hers is seen as a crucial motif in the film (104). In the cabin where Kathie shoots Fisher mercilessly, she is lit in a way that there is no “fill” light, making her look like a bloodless vampire (104). Ironically, it’s her whiteness that likens her to Eunice (104). It shows their “social death” both hints at a hidden history of subordination (104). Scruggs argues that Kathie turns white with dread not because she is inherently malevolent but because she fears that Fisher will return her to Whit (104). She is a trapped runaway. Her whiteness casts a penciled shadow against the wall that outlines her person, hinting at her double, Eunice.
Moving on to Cat People, E. Ann Kaplan writes in her book, Looking for the Other, that the film comments on both patriarchal, nationalist and racist oppressions without taking a fully resisting stance (114). Kaplan posits that Cat People harbors numerous references to America’s xenophobia seen in Irena’s foreignness (114). The film relfects some Nazi iconography in the textures of Irena’s clothes (Kaplan 114). One can see it in the overstated furs and stiff black body of the Cat Woman who Irena meets in the restaurant early in the film.
Not only that, Kaplan suggests that Irena’s cross between a white woman and a black panther denotes the unconscious tensions between white and African American relations, especially fears of the black women (114). The hybrid of woman and animal hints at fears of white Americans “mixing” with African Americans (114). Interestingly, Kaplan also proposes that such a linkage is contradictory. This linking of Africans with animals masks an envy of the greater virility and exposes displaced envy (114).
Kaplan discovers another interesting relation in the film. That is, the relation between American and normality. Irena has from the beginning of the movie been branded as “foreign” because of her European roots. This idea that Irena can become normal by becoming American permeates the entire film. For example, Oliver constantly uses myths about America being the only safe nation to dismiss Irena’s fears of her culture’s legend. He said in one instant, “They're fairy-tales, Irena, fairy tales heard in your childhood, nothing more than that. They have nothing to do with you, really. You're Irena, you're here in America. You're so normal you're even in love with me, Oliver Reed, a good plain Americano. You're so normal you're gonna marry me, and those fairy-tales, you can tell 'em to our children. They'll love 'em.” It is as if by being in America, those legends will cease to exist. Nothing sinister can exist in America.
Alice in Cat People corresponds with Oliver’s American-ness very well (116). Already acquainted as co-workers, Oliver is more comfortable around Alice than he should be. “Oh, you can tell Alice anything, she's such a good egg - she can understand anything,” he said in defense of discussing intimate matters about Irena with the “all American girl.” It is Alice who suggests Irena to consult with Dr. Judd, the psychoanalyst. It is also Alice who goes off with Oliver at the end instead of the exotic Irena. Hence, the nationalisn sentiment is detected when the all-American couple walks into the end of the horizon, and what’s foreign and dark is excluded (117).
Kaplan has also taken notice that blackness is blatantly associated with danger, savageness and fear in Cat People (121). One prominent example is the scene where Alice is stalked in the lonely street. This scene embodies the fantasies of white people being stalked in the city by black, foreign, or undesirable people (121). It’s almost as if the city automatically becomes dangerous once something foreign enters it. Another significant example is the pool scene. The fear of blackness can be seen vividly in the way Irena turns into a black leopard and savagely rips into Alice’s bathrobe. Or rather, it is the indication that Irena has somehow turned into a black leopard and caused a ruckus that makes the atmosphere even more sinister. It’s interesting that the camera never shows us directly the monster Irena has turned into. Perhaps it’s a comment on how white Amercians behave toward African Americans then - they never look them in the eye and treat them as equals. The film is built on the suggestion of horror, and the fact that blackness is linked with horror in the pool scene tells the audience that blackness is something they should all fear. In precedence of the scene, we see an African American waitress serving Oliver and Alice late at night in a cafe. The waitress’ invisibility is marked when Alice and Oliver fail to interact with her in their usual friendly manner (121). Coincidentally, this waitress is played by Theresa Harris, who also stars as Kathie’s maid, Eunice Leonard, in Out of The Past. Her contribution remains uncredited in both movies. Sadly, Harris’ acting career is only one of the many examples of how limited and degenerating the roles African Americans were given to play in the movies back then. They were usually not even given a character to embody but a role or position that was to in some ways “help” their white counterpart .
Bibliography
Hoberman, J. "‘Cat People’ And A Gallery Of Horror Predators". Nytimes.Com, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/movies/cat-people-and-a-gallery-of-horror-predators.html.
Kaplan, E. Ann. Looking For The Other. Taylor And Francis, 2012.
Scruggs, Charles. “Out of the Black Past: The Image of the Fugitive Slave in Jacques Tourneur's ‘Out of the Past.’” African American Review, vol. 44, no. 1/2, 2011, pp. 97–113. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41328708. Accessed 29 Mar. 2020.