After nearly a year of creating this blog space...but not doing a damn thing with it but meaning to...I found a perfect reason for this film lover to start on it again: a wonderful surprise of a classic old film melding with reality outside my window!
Tonight I finally watched the double bill of producer Val Lewton's classic "Cat People" (1942) and the totally different sequel "Curse of the Cat People" (1944).
A raging snowstorm crippling a good part of the eastern seaboard is currently raging outside my window as I finished the double feature at 3 a.m. (No job this week, so the night owl in me loves watching movies late at night.)
The haunting film "Curse of the Cat People" is an odd sequel, where even though main characters from the first spooky film-noir horror film with a psychosexual nature are in it...it's a totally different film set in leafy suburbia, about a young girl who has an active fantasy life, and she sees "her new friend", who just might be the ghost of the "cat woman" from the first film.
The last 20 minutes of the film take place with a raging snowstorm hitting the area, and the little girl runs out of her house and down the road.
Now...I'm someone who my friends know as a dork who LOVES watching films when the outside world matches the mood and/or location. Like, Christmas films at Christmastime (like a lot of people), but equally so, a sultry Tennessee Williams film on a hot summer day...or if i'm somewhere in the country, then a film set in the country, and so on. (A funny friend once suggested that the perfect place for me to watch "Titanic" would be on a sinking cruise ship. Funny yes, but MAN wouldn't that be effective?!?!?)
So.....as I'm watching the end of this film with the girl running out in the snow...I realized I was having a goosebump moment with what I like to do with films. It was pure randomness that I picked this night to watch these two 1940s films I've heard so much about. And I had no idea the sequel ended with a raging snowstorm.
So, let me paint the (motion) picture:
Even on a snowy night, there's enough ambient whiteness outside where one can go turn off the lights, pull up the blinds, and have enough light to not stumble around. So I did that as the film showed this snowstorm in it, for that Dorky Bob film-watching ambiance. Add in the light from the decently large TV screen, and my computer (which i soon turned off for more spookiness), and it was like being in a movie theater, somewhat, where the film image is more effective with mostly darkness around it.
My room in Queens has 4 large windows facing south, where a streetlight also throws a little light in, especially with the blinds up to marvel at the near-blizzard outside. Also, a somewhat old tree with thick branches near my 2nd floor view.
With me so far?....
As the little girl is running down the country road in the raging black & white 1943 fake snowstorm (but done oh so effectively...this is a beautifully shot film)....I see that as I go to turn off my computer screen by the 4 windows, with the TV behind me across the room.....the reflection of my TV is in one of my 4 windows.
So......how cool is it that swirling driving snow is in these 1940s scenes....and its reflected on my window with the real 2009 snow swirling around the image of the TV reflection on the glass!
But wait, it gets better!!!
Soon enough, this poor girl huddles against a large tree as the snowfall gets thicker, and the camera tracks in on her. Forget about the real image on my TV, with the tree she's against leaning a certain way..... the reflection of the movie in my window, reversed, shows her huddled---
--- against her tree trunk PERFECTLY MATCHING THE THICK TREE BRANCH OUTSIDE MY WINDOW, LEANING THE SAME WAY!!!! The sepia look outside my window (thanks to the streetlight wattage) blended with the black & white movie absolutely perfectly!!
You get it?? Right then and there, I had to pause the DVD...and marvel at the surprise magical moment! Something shot in 1943 PERFECTLY MATCHED itself with the real view outside my window. And the blowing snow was perfectly matched as well!! I've seen many a film, old or new, where snow falls nicely. Not a lot of films have raging blizzards in them, especially when you never knew it would be in the film. How often does NYC get a raging snowstorm? Maybe once a winter. (Of course, 3 years ago, one huge one closed down my Christmas short film's production, but that's another story.)
The fact that this snow in this old film looked EXACTLY, swirling flake for swirling flake, like what's outside my window even as I type this (no way I'm falling asleep without writing about this yet), with no people or cars outside to spoil the moment (a blanket of white keeping everyone home...and it IS the middle of the night after all), and that tree branch matched not the real image on my TV, but the reflection of it in the window looking out at it......my god. Goosebump time.
As the film draws to a close, the little girl comes to an old house that figures in the story. The old lady of the place greets her, and with the camera shooting down the hall to see them coming in the door....the storm WHOOSHES the door open, with old-movie storm sound effects giving me an eerily effective soundtrack to what's outside my window in 2009, and again the magic of the TV reflection in my window shows the storm blowing the door open EXACTLY AS THE SNOW OUTSIDE BECOMES BLIZZARD LIKE AND BLOWS IN THAT PRECISE DIRECTION!!! Like the 2009 storm outside blew open the 1943 door!
There was no way I watched the rest of the film facing the TV. The coolness of all this, and remember this is a beautiful haunting film about a child who sees images that no one else sees (a precursor to "Pan's Labyrinth"), had me watching the remaining 10 minutes of the film staring at the movie's reflection in the window....my back to the TV. Any neighbors still up would see me staring out at the storm, but not knowing that I was looking at an image ONLY I COULD SEE! Like the little girl.
Do you see why I had to type all this out before going to bed? A melding of classic cinema and scarily beautiful reality, 66 years apart, that I didn't plan at all. The snow is still gorgeously swirling around the lone streetlight outside my window, nearly 4 a.m. now, and except for exactly one slowly driving car and a snowplow while I wrote this....there's not a soul in sight on my normally busy Queens suburban street, making it the backdrop for a magical moment that thrilled this film lover.
Now, if only the movie was set in Kew Gardens, Queens, and not Tarrytown, NY....
....could one die from too many goosebumps?.....
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