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.

CAT PEOPLE (1942)

 

(Director: Jacques Tourneur. Screenwriter: DeWitt Bodeen.)

Storyline

A Serbian immigrant woman weds an American man, triggering her superstitious belief that she’ll turn into jungle cat if she has sex with her husband.

 

Review

When an American, Oliver Reed (Kent Smith, THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, 1944), marries a Serbian fashion artist, the neurotic Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon, THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, 1944), it exacerbates an irrational terror within her. She fears that if she kisses her husband, she’ll turn into a jungle cat and tear him apart. Her terror and his frustration are heightened when he and his close co-worker, Alice Moore (Jane Randolph, THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, 1944), realize they’re in love.

A psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway, THE SEVENTH VICTIM, 1943), tries to help the distraught Irena, who stalks Alice and Oliver at night. (Conway reprised his character in SEVENTH, a character-linked prequel to CAT.)

Irena’s downward emotional trajectory worsens, underscoring an increasingly dangerous question: can she be saved before she transforms, goes murderously insane?

At seventy-three minutes, this is a stunning film. The psychological and nuanced potency of DeWitt Bodeen’s taut, character-sketched screenplay is further brought to iconic and suspenseful life by its visual and musical aspects. Roy Webb’s score is dramatic without being overly so; art directors Albert S. D’Agostino and Walter E. Keller’s use of chiaroscuro and animation is enhanced by Nicholas Muscuraca’s cinematography, Mark Robson’s editing and Jacques Tourneur’s direction.

Acting-wise, all the players are dead-on in their roles. The leads are backed by notable actors, including Alec Craig (THE SPIDER WOMAN, 1943) as a “Zookeeper” and Alan Napier (THE UNINVITED, 1944) as Doc Carver─both Craig and Napier are uncredited in their CAT roles.

CAT is one of my all-time favorite films of any genre, one that is worth seeing if you enjoy suspenseful, psychological films with striking visual aspects and haunting characters. 

THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943)

 

(Director: Mark Robson. Screenwriter: Charles O’Neal and DeWitt Bodeen.)

Storyline

A naïve young woman goes to New York City to find her more worldly sister, who’s disappeared─and is being targeted by a satanic cult.

 

Review

Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter, THE KINDRED, 1987), a student in a Catholic boarding school, heads to New York City when her sister, Jacqueline (Jean Brooks, THE INVISIBLE MAN RETURNS, 1940), disappears. Once there, Mary discovers that Jacqueline sold her cosmetics business (La Sagesse) and that, around the same time, she somehow crossed a satanic cult, the shrouded-in-mystery Palladists.

The mystery of her sister’s disappearance grows darker when an ally─a private investigator, Irving August (an uncredited Lou Lubin)─is stabbed by an unseen assailant, dying in front of Mary while his murderer escapes.

More creepy, suspenseful weirdness occurs. Mary is aided in her quest by Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont, THE MOLE PEOPLE, 1956), Jacqueline’s husband, and Jason Hoag (Erford Gage), a poet who’s friends with Jacqueline. Their help leads them to Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), Jacqueline’s psychiatrist─a reprise of Conway’s character in Jacques Tourneur’s loosely linked sequel, CAT PEOPLE (1942). Eventually, things come to a non-violent climax when Mary and her allies directly confront the cultists, with mixed results.

This tightly shot, atmospheric and mostly non-violent thriller is a rewatchable subversive high point in the horror genre. Its stylized look is drenched in plays of shadow and light (courtesy of legendary cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, CAT PEOPLE, 1942); it goes a long way toward creating a mixed horror-noir vibe while Roy Webb’s score furthers its suspenseful, melancholic mood─Webb, among his other works, scored the 1959 film RETURN OF THE FLY.

Charles O’Neal (CRY OF THE WEREWOLF, 1944) and DeWitt Bodeen (CAT PEOPLE, 1942) penned a slyly written screenplay that brings to the screen themes and settings that the Production Code Administration (PCA), a Catholic-faith forerunner to the MPAA, frowned upon. One of these elements is that of suicide, strong hinted at in a key scene in SEVENTH─a scene I’ve read puzzles modern viewers who seem to be allergic to subtlety, in this case Code-forced subtlety. (Suicides were not allowed to be shown in films in 1943; villainy had to be punished by the law or accidental death.)

Another then-subversive element is that of sexuality. Jacqueline and Dr. Judd’s interactions imply they had an affair, another PCA no-no. Not only that, Frances Fallon (Isabel Jewell, BORN TO KILL, 1947) reacts to Jacqueline’s disappearance and possible death in such a weepy, furious way that it’s obvious there was something more than friendship going on between them. The fact that SEVENTH is set in gay- and lesbian-friendly Greenwich Village, and that at least one funny-quip gay character was shown cements the nature of Jacqueline’s alluded-to relationships.

Some viewers may appreciate a cleverly shot shower scene with Mary that not only slips under the radar of the PCA’s ire but predates Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller PSYCHO by seventeen years. These same viewers may also appreciate seeing an uncredited Elizabeth Russell (THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, 1944) as Mimi, Jacqueline’s melancholic neighbor.

SEVENTH is a seventy-one-minute gem of a B flick, one that I consider to be perfect, given the period it was made and its multilayered themes, characters and settings, all guided to the screen by producer Val Lewton and director Mark Robson, who brought their talent, passion and editing expertise to it. This is not only worth your time, it’s worth owning.

Citation

“Lewton vs. Breen” by Clive Dawson (The Dark Side magazine, issue 210, pp. 40-9)