Bring Back the Cat

This article, intended as a sequel to my BFI classic booklet on Cat People, is prompted by the re-release of producer Val Lewton's Cat People films - Jacques Tourneur's Cat People [1942] and Gunther v. Fritsch and Robert Wise's The Curse of the Cat People [1944] - on an essential double bill. While thinking about this pendant, I overheard a critic express enthusiasm for the less-known Curse, swiftly qualified with 'it's a shame about the title because, of course, it isn't a sequel and it isn't a horror film'.

It's easy to see what our friend, presumably no devotee of the Mummy movies Universal were cranking out as Lewton's RKO unit was making the Cat People films, means. By the 40s, any remotely successful horror film could be a franchise [cf: Devil Bat's Daughter, 1946], reducing the gothic-romantic genre of the 30s to an assembly line for childish shudder pulps whose doggily lovable monster protagonists were often played by Lon Chaney Jr [himself, a 'son of']. Despite a few lines of dialogue about the 'curse' on the Reed family, Curse doesn't seem to deliver what might have been expected from a sequel. Then again, Cat People doesn't deliver what might have been expected from a distaff variation on The Wolf Man [1941]. Lewton's specific, stated approach was not to get round his bosses' demands that he make certain types of films but to make them better, and with more imagination [a key, ambiguous element of the Curse script], than anyone else. Seen on a double bill with Cat People, it becomes obvious that The Curse of the Cat People is a sequel and it is a horror film. The secret of its greatness is that it is a very unusual sequel and an extremely left-field horror film.

To recap briefly, Cat People introduces us to Irena Dubrovna [Simone Simon], a Serbian girl in New York, who is unable to consummate her marriage to 'plain Americano' Oliver Reed [Kent Smith] because she is terrified that she will turn into a murderous black panther if sexually aroused. This eventually drives the impatient Oliver to the arms of a more straightforward workmate Alice [Jane Randolph], which prompts Irena to embrace her cat person nature and transform several times to menace her rival. Finally 'kissed' by her lecherous psychoanalyst, Dr Louis Judd [Tom Conway], she becomes a big cat, who kills the shrink even as he runs her through with a swordcane ['not silver', we are told, to force a contrast with The Wolf Man]. Hitherto, apparently at Tourneur's insistence as much as Lewton's, Irena's panther form has been suggested by shadows rather than shown outright. Even in death, we don't see the monster Irena has turned into. However, attempts to read Cat People as a study of psychological rather than supernatural shapeshifting are untenable. A privileged shot [seen by the audience but no screen characters] shows us a cat's footprints becoming the marks of high-heeled shoes [a gag that references a similar moment in The Wolf Man]. As he looks at Irena's corpse, Oliver is forced to conclude 'she never lied to us'.

Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful [1952] contains an a clef account of the making of Cat People. Ambitious producer Jonathan Shields [Kirk Douglas] is assigned to make The Doom of the Cat Men and opts to employ shadows rather than monster costumes to terrify the audience, but is disgusted after the successful premiere when he is 'rewarded' with his next assignment The Son of the Cat Man. Most accounts of Lewton's career suggest this is how he reacted when he was asked to follow up his great success with a film called The Curse of the Cat People. However, even without front office prompting, he seems to have been willing to repeat and elaborate upon himself. His third film, Jacques Tourneur's The Leopard Man [1943], is already a reworking of elements from Cat People, and the masterly The Seventh Victim [1943], directed by Mark Robson, is an unacknowledged spin-off, with Tom Conway returning as Dr Judd and another haunted woman [Jean Brooks] rushing to embrace death. Sequels are made for many reasons, not all commercial: The Seventh Victim is a return to the world of Cat People, and provides an alternate life for one of the earlier film's main characters. Its plot is irreconcilable with Curse, and yet the themes of all three films interweave.

By the time he told Lewton to make a Cat People sequel, RKO production chief Charles Koerner [a Lewton supporter] must have known better than to expect him to take one of the obvious routes: to bring Irena back from the dead [as in the sequels to Universal's 'gorilla people' quickie Captive Wild Woman, 1943] or to discover a hitherto-unacknowledged descendant of the Dubrovna [as in Dracula's Daughter, 1935]. If those did not appeal, there was always the bare-faced cheek of Monogram's Return of the Ape Man [1944], which is not a sequel to the Bela Lugosi vehicle The Ape Man [1943] but justifies its title by being about an ape man who returns. The literature on Lewton suggests that he opted instead to make a fresh film about child psychology and was unsuccessful in an attempt to get it retitled Amy and Her Friend, but co-director Robert Wise admits that a paramount concern was that the film contain enough thrills to be promoted as 'at least a semi-horror film'. Actually, Curse, scripted by DeWitt Bodeen [who had written Cat People], subtly uses both standard sequel approaches - Irena does return from beyond the grave, and the central character is almost Cat Woman's Daughter.

In an era before video when audience memories were expected to fade a little between individual series films, Curse goes out of its way to pick up the threads. Kent Smith and Jane Randolph return as Oliver and Alice, now married and with a daughter, Amy [Ann Carter], and Simon also shows up again, as a transformed Irena who is perhaps an angelic ghost and perhaps Amy's imaginary friend but who nevertheless haunts all the major characters in an ambiguous manner. Roy Webb's score reuses motifs established in the first film, including a lullaby associated with Irena that is vital to the plot. A Goya portrait of a child with cats that decorated Irena's apartment in Cat People has been put up in the Reeds' new home ['it doesn't fit, does it?' says Alice, significantly, 'but it's part of our lives too'].

Uniquely, Curse shows us a couple whose lives have credibly evolved since the first film - the Reeds have moved from New York to Tarrytown, and Oliver has advanced from draughtsman to apparently self-employed naval designer who relaxes by making model ships. These characters have been shaped by the events we have seen them live through. Oliver has retreated from an enforced belief in the supernatural and can now tell himself his dead first wife was mentally ill rather than a werepanther. Alice, subtly played by the underrated Randolph, has clearly learned more from the Irena experience, and become more sensitive, though her tenaciousness and conservatism are still evident.

The only fudged linkage between the films is the typical one of time: in the two years since Cat People, Oliver and Irena have married and had a six-year-old daughter - if Cat People, which doesn't mention the War, is set in 1940-41, then Curse must take place in what was then a post-war future of 1946 or 47. This is a lot easier to swallow than the twenty-year gaps between each of the four Mummy movies made between 1941 and 44, which should take the plot well into the 21st century. The Mummy's Curse, released eight months after The Mummy's Ghost, even sneaks in a locale switch: the mummy drowns in a swamp in Massachusetts [!] at the end of one film and is revived in a Louisiana bayou at the beginning of the next. Beside this, it is almost reasonable that between the Cat People films, Irena's ethnicity switches almost subliminally [she sings in French and the name 'Dubrovna' is never mentioned] to align with that of Simone Simon.

Like Universal, which began to intertwine its monster series with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man [1942], Lewton liked to bring back actors from film to film. He stretches the point in Curse by casting the striking Elizabeth Russell, the other cat woman encountered eerily by Irena in a Serbian restaurant in Cat People, as a new character, the neurotic and tormented Barbara Farren. Since the other returnees are in the same roles, this causes a slight confusion [Russell is in The Seventh Victim too, as yet another glamorous, desperate, doomed woman], though nothing like the way Dwight Frye or Lionel Atwill would show up as fresh grave-robber or police inspector characters in each Universal Frankenstein film.

The counter-reading of Curse is that it isn't 'really' a horror film but a sensitive study of a lonely child who takes refuge in a fantasy relationship with an imaginary friend [who takes form as a fairy princess Simone Simon]. The fact is that the film manages to be both, and those who insist that it should be one 'respectable' thing [a psychological study] rather than something as odious as a ghost or horror story are missing a whole series of points - that all great horror or ghost stories have emotional resonances beyond chain-clanking, and that the old dark house gothicisms and the magical fantasy garden of Curse are a literal representation of Amy's world. The film takes care to fulfil the horror side of its remit not only with gothic atmosphere and suspense sequences that have a far greater chill factor than anything going on at Universal but by deliberately evoking key works of horror literature.

Most obviously, by setting the story near Washington Irving's Sleepy Hollow, and having Amy be terrified by a recital of the legend of the Headless Horseman, Lewton taps into the first great spook story in American letters [soon to be revisited by Tim Burton]. There are also elements of Henry James's Turn of the Screw in Amy's relationship with the ghost of a parent figure violently disapproved-of by her living father. Jack Clayton's The Innocents [1961], an adaptation of the James, draws one incident not from the book but from the Lewton film: Quint and Miss Jessell are not given faces until Deborah Kerr finds a photograph of them [providing, as in the Lewton, an alternative, 'psychological' reading of the plot]. Toss in a snippet of R.L. Stevenson's 'The Unseen Playmate' - which pulls off the trick of presenting the magical world of childhood with enough sinister edge to undercut the sentimentality of the surface text - and you have almost a themed anthology, A Child's Garden of Horrors.

A great deal of the film is concerned with the sensitive Amy's troubles with other children and her family, and Lewton allegedly worked autobiographical elements - like the party invites a child posts in 'a magic mailbox' in a hollow tree, resulting in an unattended birthday bash and her ostracism among the children who didn't get their invitations - into the script. Lewton is perhaps unique in the American cinema, a producer-as-auteur whose influence over his films is seen to be always beneficial. When Lewton's old boss David O. Selznick replaced directors in mid-shoot and imposed his own personal obsessions on a script, the results were almost always a curate's egg [Duel in the Sun, 1946] and sometimes seriously malformed a potentially interesting project [The Wild Heart, 1950 - Selznick's 'approved' version of Gone to Earth]. Lewton, however, was that rare thing: a visionary team player. If made today, Curse would probably be an Allan Smithee film - original director Gunther von Fritsch was dismissed not for the low quality of his work but because he was shooting too slowly, and Robert Wise was promoted from editor and seamlessly took over. Von Fritsch didn't have a career, but Wise went on to be a major figure [though, like Mark Robson, he never again made anything quite as good as his Lewton films]. Lewton's eleven RKO films were made by three directors, written by a small group of scenarists [all of whom were extensively revised by Lewton who, like Hitchcock, was invisibly a great screenwriter], and draw on the same pool of technicians and contract players. The 'Lewton' personality comes from all these people.

In terms of carrying over from Cat People, we see that Oliver is as cloddish and ineffectual, though well-intentioned, as a father as he was as a husband, which is complicated by lingering feelings for his first wife that are passed on to his daughter ['she could almost be Irena's child,' he muses]. Alice, who seems to have learned most from the first film but doesn't feel the need to talk about it, is as might reasonably be expected more effectively sympathetic towards her daughter than she was to Irena. But these are still the limited, 'plain Americanos' they always were: Alice quivers downstairs on Twelfth Night, at once upset and almost proud that Amy is receiving her first corporal punishment from Oliver ['a first spanking,' says her schoolteacher friend, 'it's an important occasion']. It is this chastisement that drives Amy out into the snows for a brush with imaginary terrors [the hoofbeats of the Headless Horseman turn out to be the clanking snowchains of a passing car, a classic Lewton 'bus'] and the real possibility of death at the Farren House.

The horrors are located within the Farren House, a neighbourhood 'bad place' with precedents in literature back to the House of Usher and descendents in the likes of Hill House in director Wise's version of The Haunting and the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Those who don't consider Curse a horror film must shut their eyes during these scenes, which display a fine grasp of genre set-decoration [Albert S. D'Agostino] and lighting camerawork [Nicholas Musuraca] and are unmistakably an inspiration for the look and emotional pressure cooker of the Bates House in Psycho [1960]. Amy is invited in by Mrs Farren [Julia Dean], once a great actress, who terrifies but enchants her with her dramatic recitals and tales of long-ago glamour. Mrs Farren's graciousness with this strange child only emphasises what a monster she really is, refusing to acknowledge that her daughter is anything but 'just the woman who looks after me' and claiming that her Barbara died when she was about Amy's age. In the cruel scenes between these women is the nugget of a whole sub-genre of American gothic horror that would emerge in the 1960s, in the wake of Psycho and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? [1962], in which ageing women trapped in decaying houses exact pointless and drawn-out revenges for imagined slights and, typically, matters are resolved with a death on the stairs.

The finale is truly extraordinary, opting for a way out of the horror few subsequent films have taken - though the scene is weirdly almost a blueprint for John Wayne's refusal to kill Natalie Wood at the end of The Searchers. Mrs Farren dies [on the stairs] of a heart attack, while trying to get Amy to hide from Barbara, prompting the jealous woman ['even my mother's last moments you've stolen from me'] to near the child with strangler's hands. Seeing Irena's soft phantom overlain on the hawk-faced Barbara, which evokes the twinning of Russell and Simon in Cat People, Amy appeals 'my friend, my friend' and Barbara embraces rather than throttles the girl. The well-lit, modern but folksy Reed home is in contrast with the gothic Farren house, with its stuffed cats and inky shadows, but we have seen that the ill-faith that infests the place, which has driven Amy to love a ghost or a conjuring of her own mind, could easily spiral out of control and fester into the monstrous, soul-stifling situation of the haunted house round the corner. If Amy had found a 'real friend', might she not have become one of the girls in Heavenly Creatures [1994]? Peter Jackson's film is just one of a string of movies, in and out of genre, that build on the achievements of Curse, exploring the wonders and terrors of childhood: The Magnet [1951], Night of the Hunter [1955], The Nanny [1964], Our Mother's House [1967], The Shining [1980], Paperhouse [1988].

At the fade-out, just as the last line of Cat People confirms that Irena was a real cat person, Oliver claims to see his daughter's imaginary friend [not really meaning it, but trying to forge a connection with the girl], implying that Amy doesn't need Irena any more in line with the last chapter of The House at Pooh Corner and the song 'Puff the Magic Dragon' [both cordially distressing to their child audiences]. Father and daughter go indoors and Irena fades away. This is another privileged shot; as she vanishes, Irena is alone in the garden, which confirms to us that she really was there all the time.

First Published In: Sight & Sound.

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