Irena

 I had watched "The Seventh Victim" last night and decided to go ahead and revisit Cat People (1942) tonight instead of October. I'd like to try and get in a bunch of the usual suspects that typically do show up in October in September, freeing up some space for other films that perhaps never get room in the month of Halloween. Simone Simon, as Serbian fashion artist beauty, Irena, is so demure and sweet, seemingly so harmless when introduced, but, by film's end, goes full panther with Tom Conway's soothing-voiced intellectual psychiatrist (infatuated with and attracted to her), ripping him apart...you see Irena's "claws" coming out in what is left of Jane Randolph's robe in the iconic swimming pool sequence. Irena, unable to make love to her boat architect husband, Kent Smith (as Ollie), spends most of their marriage either crying naked in her tub or her head against the bedroom door seemingly yearning to be intimate. But what happens to Conway's Dr. Louis Judd could have happened to Oliver, and Randolph's Alice sure seemed lucky to just be frightened by a bus and panther growls. Even a canary realizes Irena is a dangerous threat, dropping dead when she reaches in to pet him. That desire to be with her man, enjoy his touch, not fond she's losing him to another woman (a woman he's known much longer than her) but seemingly incapable of keeping him because she loves him and doesn't want to kill him...and the past, when her people are cursed for their sins, keeps Irena from being able to fully embrace her man.