The Curse of the Cat People **** (1944, Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph, Ann Carter) – Classic Movie Review 2762

Co-writer/producer Val Lewton’s 1944 sequel to his 1943 Cat People is an eerie, melodramatic, film noir horror fantasy about a lonely child called Amy Reed (Ann Carter, aged six). She gets tangled up with an imaginary world inhabited by the benevolent spirit Irena Dubrovna Reed (Simone Simon), the dead first wife of her father Oliver Reed (Kent Smith), who is now married to the caring Alice (Jane Randolph).

Amy finds a picture of Irena, whom Ollie Reed believes drove herself mad by imagining herself to be a cat woman. And, when Amy is playing alone, wishing for a friend, Irena appears before her as an imaginary figure, a fantasy friend. Amy also befriends aging reclusive actress Julia Farren (Julia Dean), who is alienated from her own daughter Barbara (Elizabeth Russell).

Début director Robert Wise and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca work together to create a marvellously brooding atmosphere in a vibrant, creepy film.

Admittedly, it is a tenuous, mostly unrelated sequel, but it is one nonetheless. The movie has a completely different story and no visible cat people. But the films share the three main characters, there’s the ghost of a character established as a cat person in the first film, and they are stylistically and thematically similar.

Lewton sacked original director Gunther von Fritsch and replaced him with Citizen Kane/The Magnificent Ambersons editor Wise, though they share the credit. Fritsch had fallen behind schedule and Wise completed the film nine days late and over budget. DeWitt Bodeen shares the writing credit with Lewton.

Sets from Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) were re-used for economy.

It was still looking good in 1999 when Britain’s National Film Theatre screened a new 35mm print and the BFI released it to cinemas.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2762

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