Cat People

** 1/2 "Night Tide." International Filmforum. $79.95. 1963. This bizarre little film--writer-director Curtis Harrington's fiction feature debut--is basically the 1942 "Cat People" updated to 1963 and reset in Venice Beach in a milieu of boardwalks, beach piers, coffeehouses and rootless Kennedy-era drifters. The bedevilled heroine (Linda Lawson), who impersonates a mermaid on the Venice Pier sideshow, also imagines she's part of an ancient race of murderous sea-people.

Dear Producers: Caught your national touring company's opening of "Cats" at the Pantages Tuesday. Saw it but didn't really hear it. The orchestrations were clear, but those whimsical, delicate, affectionate lyrics and verses of Mr. T. S. Eliot's were so muffled and muddied that I missed the spell the show is supposed to cast. In truth, I had seen the show before so I knew about the special ritual of these city cats under the great white moon in that wonderful garbage dump of a set.

DeWitt Bodeen, who was a principal screenwriter in the film versions of "Cat People" and "Billy Budd" and later wrote movie-related books, died Saturday of bronchial pneumonia at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills. He was 79. Once a stage actor, Bodeen began his script-writing career as a research assistant to British novelist Aldous Huxley, one of the writers on the Hollywood version of "Jane Eyre."

RCA/Columbia's "About Last Night . . .," released this week, is a great advertisement for the one-night stand. It shows how an attractive young couple (Rob Lowe and Demi Moore) haltingly build a relationship out of a sexual fling. This romantic comedy/drama, based on David Mamet's play, "Sexual Perversity in Chicago" (a much better title), scored with both critics and fans--grossing about $28 million.

"I don't photograph well," said Argentine novelist Manuel Puig in fluent English. "I always end up looking . . ." and he bugs and rolls his large, dark eyes, imitating a horrific character out of a 1930s B movie. Puig loves those movies, and the plots of two of them, "The Cat People" and "I Walked With a Zombie," form part of his best-known novel, "Kiss of the Spider Woman."

Fluffy, curly, sleek and hairless they will come, the ratters and the mutants, the supreme grand champions and the glamour pusses--as well as the big names: Ruffy, Sir Rufus Velvetpaw and Britanya's Lord E, I'm Naked! In all, 350 purebred, newly bred and ordinary household cats--from as far away as France--will be at the Anaheim Convention Center on Saturday and Sunday for one of the country's largest cat shows, the International Cat Show put on by the International Cat Assn.

"Midnight Express." Sound track. Casablanca. Before buying old titles in CD, it's wise to listen again to the LP or cassette version of an album to make sure the music stands up. This is especially true of albums whose appeal rested in large part on technology--as in the synthesizer-based tension on this 1978 sound track.

The Natural History Museum has followed the unprecedented success of its summer dinosaur exhibit with an artistic cat show that figuratively roars, howls and meows in its depiction of the members of felidae, the carnivorous family including cats of all sizes. The exhibition, dubbed "The Eclectic Cat," presents the lore, evolution and cultural relevance of cats--big and small, tamed and untamed--by using nature, art and artifact.