Throughout cinema history, there have been some iconic nude scenes that have transcended the bounds of the films in which they appeared. Our weekly columnAnatomy of a Scene's Manatomywill take an in-depth look at these scenes, their history, their deeper meanings, and their legacy.
This October, we're offering up some seasonally appropriate chills and thrills—along with our patented spills—with a month of horror movies that bring more male nudity to the table than their contemporaries! This week, Malcolm McDowell fully embraces his status as the king of showing his cock in schlock with Paul Schrader's 1982 modernization of the classic horror flick Cat People!
In the finalchapter of Peter Biskind's seminal Hollywood tome "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,"thereare a handful of pages devoted to stories about Paul Schrader's ego-run-amok during the production of 1982'sCat People. Following his unqualified success asawriter withTaxi Driver, Schrader's star as a director was on the rise thanks to a run of films that were modest successes, likeHardcoreand American Gigolo. He proceeded to sink that reputation with the wildly uneven, big budget disaster that was Cat People.
Schrader recounts his addiction tococaine and pills during the production in that book saying, "Everybody on the film was doing drugs except Nastassja (Kinski). The drugs were really fucking me up. One day, I had been doing coke in my trailer, I didn't want to come out." The result is up there on screen, as the film is an incalculable mess. The film—and the rough state in which it exists—can almost be seen as a metaphor for Schrader's own failings at the time, though he would center himself and correct that lack of focus with his follow-up 1985'sMishima: A Life in Four Chapters.
To set the scene a bit, Universal Studios and producer Ned Tanen were trying desperately to relaunch a bunch of old horror titles to which they still owned the rights. Not so much the classic Universal monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein, but more obscure, less beloved RKO properties like Howard Hawks' The Thing From Another World and Jacques Tourneur's Cat People.This film and John Carpenter'sThe Thing—both of which began life as more straight remakes before theauteurs got involved—went into production right around the same time and were both spectacular box office and critical failures upon their release in 1982.
While Carpenter's effort has since been recognized for the horror masterpiece that it is, Schrader'sCat Peoplehas aged about as well as the feathered hair sported by several of the film's leads.The film was almost instantlydated upon release nearly forty years ago, and now feels more woefully so thanks to its bizarrely arcane sexualmores.
The film stars Malcolm McDowell and Nastassja Kinski as long-lost siblings descended from a bloodline of titular feline folks who risk turning into murderous big cats if they have sex with anyone outside their own bloodline. Should they happen to transform into, in Malcolm's case, a panther after having sex with someone outside the family, they must then kill a person to transform back into a human. This pushes McDowell's character to sleep with a lot of prostitutes he can then easily devour to become human again.
Welcome to Cat People, the umpteenth film about bizarre sexual predilections starring Malcolm McDowell. The behind the scenes anecdotes from "Easy Riders..." are all focused on Schrader and Kinski's sexual relationship during the making of the film, as one would expect from a salacious Hollywood tome. However, McDowell's participation in the film is equally puzzling and worthy of exploration. McDowell initially turned down the role of Paul Gallier, a drifter currently living in New Orleans with his former Creole housekeeper, played by the great Ruby Dee.
The film's main conflict gets set in motion when Paul has sex with a prostitute but fails to kill her, ultimately being captured by animal control and brought to the zoo. Prior to that encounter, however, McDowell finds himself deriving no pleasure from ahookup with a different prostitute, whom he eventually devours to turn back into a human...
On the film's 2014 blu-ray release from Shout! Factory, McDowell reveals in an interview that he initially turned down the studio's offer to appear in the film because he thought Tourneur's 1942original "was rubbish," an opinion with which the Criterion Collection begs to differ. However, McDowell's opinion was also swayed after meeting with Schrader, who sold the notoriously sexual actor on his version and its focus on the erotic side of the story. While McDowell himself has grown into a noted elder statesman and raconteur who cantellwonderful tales about his career, one look at his credits from the time prove he wasn't quite as discerning as he may like to retrospectively paint himself.
In fact, Cat People, while not very good, is far from the worst film he made in that period of his career.Most notably, it came only three years after Caligula, a debacle the likes of which has hardly been seen some four decades hence. Nowadays, hemakes as many as five or six films in a single year and is obviously much more open and candidly humorous about the poor decisions he has made over the years. However, even he is on auto-pilot through most of the film, as that scene above demonstrated, yet another victim of the film's overall careless aesthetic.
If you happened to see Cat People in a very small window of time in your life—hint, puberty—you might have some sort of sentimental attachment to it; otherwise, it's not much more than a collection of decentlyshot, horribly awkward nude scenes. There's far too many loose ends and dropped story threads to make it work as any sort of coherent whole. It certainly doesn't help that Schrader went off the deep end while making it, but honestly, the stories about the making of the film are far more entertaining than the film itself.
I'd urge you to read "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" if you haven't already and for now, I'll leave you with producer and crazy person Ned Tanen's ultimate summation of the film from that book. During a screening, Schrader was so coked out that he fell asleep, prompting Tanen to shake him awake saying, "Listen Paul, if I have to sit through this piece of shit, you have to sit through it too, you're the one who made it."
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