The Curse of the Cat People (1944)

The Curse of the Cat People is an American horror film first released in 1944, directed by Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise.  The film stars Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph, Ann Carter and Eve March.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Concerned that his daughter Amy is living in a world of her own, Oliver Reed tries to persuade the six-year-old girl to make some new friends.  This Amy is incapable of doing, until one day someone slips a ring onto her finger when she visits a dark old house in her neighbourhood.  She soon realises that the ring was given to her by the house’s owner, a reclusive former actress who lives alone with a grown-up daughter she refuses to acknowledge as her own.  Amy and the old woman take an immediate liking to one another, although the girl is scared off when her new friend tells her a frightening ghost story.   Persuaded by her Jamaican housekeeper that her recently acquired present is a wishing ring, Amy makes a wish, that she may have a special friend.  Sure enough, the apparition of a beautiful young woman appears before her.  She does not know it, but the woman is the exact likeness of Irena, her father’s first wife, who died in horrific circumstances before Amy was born...

Were it not for its title, The Curse of the Cat People would probably have long enjoyed a reputation as one of RKO’s more successful fantasy offerings.  A beautifully atmospheric film which makes effective use of the stunning sets created for Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), it combines a subtly chilling ghost story with a thoughtful evocation of a young child coming to terms with the loneliness of existence - not so much a horror film as a haunting study on the traumas of childhood and parenthood.  On purely artistic grounds, the film deserves to be rated as a near-masterpiece.  Unfortunately, the publicity-conscious executives at RKO were not content to market it on its own terms and insisted that it be sold as a sequel to a previous, very successful film of theirs, Jacques Tourneur’s classic horror film Cat People (1942).  This is only slightly madder than trying to pass off I Walked with a Zombie as a follow-up to Citizen Kane.

As is immediately apparent once you have watched both films, The Curse of the Cat People has only the most tenuous connections with Tourneur’s film, and whatever connections there are seem to have been crow-barred in as an afterthought.  Simone Simon reprises her role as Irena from the earlier film, but instead of playing a dangerous killer she is now presented as a sympathetic ghost, the kind that no parent would object to as a friend for their child.   Producer Val Lewton was adamant that the film be released under the title Amy And Her Friend, but was overruled by his bosses.  Worse, the film was heavily marketed by RKO as a direct sequel to Cat People, and its horror content exaggerated to a degree that now appears laughable.  Naturally, the hype backfired and the film was both a critical and commercial flop, and it has taken many decades for it its merits to become widely appreciated.

The Curse of the Cat People is significant in that it marked the directing debut of Robert Wise, a then editor at RKO who went on to become one of the most prolific and versatile of American film directors.  Wise’s subsequent directing credits include the seminal sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), the ever-popular musical The Sound of Music (1965) and the horror masterpiece The Haunting (1963), to name just three.  Wise was appointed to direct the film as a replacement for Gunther von Fritsch, another first-time director who committed the cardinal sins of allowing the film to fall behind schedule and get way over budget.  Wise’s talent for slowly building suspense and keeping the threat hidden beneath a thin veil of normality until the final reel is evident in this film, although what makes it particularly memorable is Nicholas Musuraca’s striking chiaroscuro photography, which has something of the timeless visual poetry of Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête (1946), particularly in the fairytale-like sequences with Simone Simon (at her most stunningly photogenic).  It may well be that a rose by any other name smells as sweet, but this enchanting little film will be forever tainted by the fact that it went out under the wrong title, a title that proved to be very apt, but not in the way that had been intended.

© Alex Sullivan 2012

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