Review: Curse of the Cat People (1944)

When is a sequel not a sequel? When the studio wants a sequel, but the previous movie wasn't set up for one.

RKO was surprised and delighted by the success of Cat People, the first of its series of low-budget horror films produced by Val Lewton, and very much wanted a sequel, despite the fact that the lead character, Irena, played so well by the exquisite Simone Simon in the original, died at the conclusion. So Lewton and screenwriter Dewitt Bodeen took the title the studio heads handed them--Curse of the Cat People--and tried to work around these circumstances to come up with a sort-of sequel, with some characters returning from the original, but with no "Curse" involved and no "Cat People" in sight.

Instead, Lewton, Bodeen and directors Gunther Frisch--who went off to fight in World War II before the movie was finished--and Robert Wise (who was a film editor at RKO at the time, but went on to have a long, distinguished career, directing such films as The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Andromina Strain, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Sound of Music, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Director--craft a gentle fable that has elements and characters from Cat People grafted onto it.

Amy, a little girl who's the daughter of the architect from the first movie (Kent Smith) and his second wife, Alice (Jane Randolph, also reprising her role from the original), has an imaginary friend...who just happens to be the architect's first wife, Irena (Simon). The girl is lonely and isolated, with only the house help (calypso singer Sir Lancelot) and an aging, senile actress (Julia Dean) to talk to.

There are few scares in Curse. Dean does a great reading of Washington Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which sets up a scene on an empty country road where Amy is sure that the Headless Horseman is going to get her. (This scene has some of the same tension as the more famous passage in The Leopard Man in which a young girl is stalked by an escaped leopard, only without that movie's gruesome result.) And, of course, there's a dramatic ending in which the little girl has to be place in jeopardy (real or imagined).

Fritsch and Wise keep Curse moving along and looking good, but the sensational title sets up an expectation that the movie attached to it can't deliver on (much like Lewton's The Ghost Ship, which also had a title that promised one kind of horror movie but delivered something entirely different). So even though Curse is a decent, intelligent little movie in its own right, it suffers by its connection to the original Cat People, which it's related to only in name. RKO would have been better off letting Cat People stand as a one-shot deal and doing this movie as a totally unrelated story under a different name.