…for a film that’s reasonably decent and excitingly composed and a nice atmospheric New Orleans spooker, but which feels at times a teeny bit too lurid and sexualized for comfort, to the point of almost feeling like an exploitation film….almost.
That would be Giorgio Moroder‘s Cat People score and especially David Bowie‘s Cat People song vs. Paul Schrader’s 1982 erotic thriller, which I watched last night on Amazon.
I hadn’t seen Schrader’s remake in many years, and it’s really not that bad for the most part. But the music is what really seizes you. My very first viewing of Cat People was in a smallish Manhattan screening room, and the sound was so weak and faint (due to mixing or volume?) you could barely hear the percussion under Bowie’s singing. The sound in this music video is perfect.
The boyish Nastassja Kinski (now 61) with the taut muscular bod and oddly shaped lips and funny European feet, and those sex scenes with the late John Heard…I don’t know what to say except that schtupping and eroticism were weighing very heavily on Schrader’s mind back then. (He was having it off with Kinski at the time.) I was also thinking a lot about eroticism and whatnot at the time, but who cared? I was just a critic in the third or fourth row.
Schrader, by the way, is back in New Orleans as we speak, shooting The Master Gardener with Joel Edgerton.
Name other extraordinary scores that were composed for reasonably decent films, and wound up being the most affecting or exciting or profound element. I’ll name three that outshone the films they were meant to enhance — Miklos Rosza‘s scores for Ben-Hur, King of Kings and El Cid.