THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944)

 

(Directors: Gunther von Fritsch, billed as Gunther V. Fritsch, and Robert Wise. Screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen.)

Storyline

An imaginative young girl makes friends with a reclusive, old actress and the ghost of her father’s first wife.

 

Review

More than six years after the events of CAT PEOPLE (1942), Alice and Oliver Reed are parents to six-year-old Amy─an imaginative, mostly solitary girl whose often-happy flights of fantasy vex the still-uptight Oliver, remind him of his insane, dead first wife, Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon, reprising her role from the 1942 film).

Amy becomes afternoon sitting-room friends with Mrs. Julia Farren (Julia Dean), an old, reclusive, and tale-telling actress who lives in a big spooky house with her adult, bitter daughter, Barbara (Elizabeth Russell, THE SEVENTH VICTIM, 1943).

Julia gives Amy a “wishing ring.” Later, Amy, wearing the ring in her backyard, asks for a friend, one who’s not mean like the other girls. Irena appears to the six-year-old just as everything around them becomes dreamlike, magical. The ghost of the Serbian fashion designer sings to the girl, soothes her, setting the tone for their future meetings, sometimes in shadowy dreams.

Oliver’s stern concern about his daughter’s wandering mind becomes alarm when Amy finds a badly hidden picture of him and Irena together, then reveals her friendship with the dead woman. Alice is firm, sensitive, and mostly cool-headed (like she was in the 1942 film) about what she calls Amy’s “imaginary friend.”

More drama, involving a blizzard, Amy, Oliver, and the Farrens, follows, culminating in a satisfying, sweet and tone-consistent finish.

This tangentially linked sequel to CAT has a different feel to than its source film. CAT  was about sexual repression. CURSE is about childhood, with its terrors and wonders.

While I like CAT slightly better, CURSE isn’t a lesser film─it’s simply my preference for CAT's themes, as everything in these films works.

 (In conveying childhood joys and fears, the latter cinematic offering is on par with Charles Laughton’s 1955 masterpiece THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER.)

CURSE’s cast and crew nailed it when they put it together. This is Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise’s first credited-director feature. DeWitt Bodeen penned the screenplay. (Bodeen also co-wrote the screenplay for SEVENTH and wrote CAT’s script.)

Albert S. D’Agnostino (THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, 1951) and Walter E. Keller (ISLE OF THE DEAD, 1945), who provided art direction in CAT, did so for CURSE, with the same excellent results. Their nuanced, theme-approprite effects are furthered by Nicholas Musuraca’s visually striking cinematography, also seen in SEVENTH and CAT. And Roy Webb’s evocative soundtrack furthers the mood set by the visual aspects of the film, the way he did in SEVENTH and many other films.

The cast is equally good to great. Kent Smith and Jane Randolph reprised their roles as Oliver Reed and Alice Reed (née Moore) in CAT PEOPLE. Ann Carter (I MARRIED A WITCH, 1942) is a delight as Amy Reed, their daughter. Erford Gage (SEVENTH) played “Police Captain.”

CURSE is a quality-consistent, mood-variant and great wrap-up to RKO Pictures’s loosely linked CAT PEOPLE trilogy (which starts with that 1942 film, continues─in a character offshoot way─in SEVENTH, followed by CURSE). Like those other two flicks, this is worth owning.