| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE
Rating: 
USA. 1944.
Director – Gunther V. Fritsch & Robert Wise, Screenplay – DeWitt Bodeen, Producer – Val Lewton, Photography (b&w) – Nicholas Musuraca, Music – Roy Webb, Makeup – Mel Berns, Art Direction – Albert S. D’Agostino & Walter E. Keller. Production Company – RKO.
Cast:
Ann Carter (Aimee Reed), Simone Simon (Irena Dubrovna), Kent Smith (Oliver Reed), Jane Randolph (Alice Reed), Julia Dean (Julia Farren), Elizabeth Russell (Barbara Farren), Eve March (Mrs Callahan), Sir Lancelot (Edward)
Plot: After the death of his wife Irena, Oliver Reed has married Alice Moore and they now have a young daughter Aimee. But Aimee is getting in trouble at school because she spends too much time daydreaming. Oliver tries to encourage her to make friends. But after Aimee finds a photo of Irena, whose name is never mentioned in the house, Irena’s ghost appears to her and the two happily strike up a friendship much to the consternation of Oliver and Alice.
With Cat People (1942), producer Val Lewton created a new approach to horror, something that has been termed ‘psychological horror’. Lewton’s trademark approach was something that exists in the mind of the viewer who was left in a constant state of ambiguity about whether they are dealing with a supernatural menace or whether the characters on the screen were imagining what was happening and there were purely mundane causes for events. Lewton’s films frequently arrived at their determined end with viewers still left unsure whether the menace was supernatural or mundane. Lewton made a number of these psychological horror films (see below for titles). But throughout his brief tenure at RKO Radio Pictures he was constantly at odds with studio management who did not understand the subtlety of his approach. With Curse of the Cat People, the studio had ordered a Cat People sequel of Lewton, but Lewton instead confounded them and produced this fine effort.
To call The Curse of the Cat People a sequel to Cat People is entirely misleading. It is a completely different story – the first film was an existential werewolf story of sorts, whereas this is a story about childhood fantasy playmates. It shares some of the same characters – the three principals of Kent Smith, Jane Randolph and Simone Simon – but is really it’s own film. It, for example, at no point requires any understanding of or reference to the first film and it is it’s own self-contained story. Nor does it involve any ‘cat people’, despite the title.
But what it does share is the same ambiguity of fantasy elements – is the manifestation of Irena real or merely an overactive child’s imagination? It is not as strongly manipulated an ambiguity as the question of whether Irena was a cat person was in the original, although the turning of Kent Smith into a parent demanding that Aimee play like other children does give a credible psychological undertow. As a film it is less concerned with ghosts than it is with the richness and power of the imagination. Indeed this could well be a common feature of all of DeWitt Bodeen’s scripts – in Cat People, here and the romantic fantasy The Enchanted Cottage (1945) he concerns himself with lonely women whose imaginations are so strong they blur the line between what is real or imagined, and who are always under pressure to forsake what they believe by people around them.
While The Curse of the Cat People is not even really a ghost story, its directors adeptly create a haunted atmosphere of old houses, strange old women and oral ghost stories, and there is a great deal of imagery which refers to Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. A scene prowling through the old house amid gloomy bric-a-brac, with Carter’s face lit up from underneath and a supernatural wind seemingly tossing the pages of a book is the most overtly supernatural seeming of scenes, even if it is really a scene that has nothing at all to do with the rest of the film and seems inserted solely for effect. There’s a very good scene with young Ann Carter huddled on a snowy bridge, waiting for The Headless Horseman, and hearing approaching hoofbeats on the soundtrack which turn into a shadow passing her and then cuts away to shop it a vehicle passing her. There is an excellent climax with Ann Carter unaware of Elizabeth Russell moving in on her with murderous intent, she in fact seeing Russell as a vision of Simon whereupon she moves to hug her. The image where the camera closes in to show Russell’s hands turning from a strangle to a hug is moving.
The film also has two directors. It was begun by Yugoslavian immigrant Gunther von Fritsch and taken over by Robert Wise. Up to that point Wise had worked as an editor, racking up some highly impressive credits – Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), as well as the Charles Laughton The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and All That Money Can Buy/The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941). Lewton let Wise take over filming from von Fritsch and then go on to direct The Body Snatcher solo the following year. Despite the two heads at the helm the film still holds together with great subtlety and finesse.
Lewton’s other horror films are:– I Walked With a Zombie (1943), The Ghost Ship (1943), The Leopard Man (1943), The Seventh Victim (1943), Isle of the Dead (1945), The Body Snatcher (1945) and Bedlam (1946).
Wise would go onto direct a number of classic films, most notably West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965). Wise has also directed a number of classic genre films:– A Game of Death (1945), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Haunting (1963), The Andromeda Strain (1971), Audrey Rose (1977) and Star Trek – The Motion Picture (1979). Gunther von Fritsch directed a handful of other minor films of no distinction.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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