The Curse of the Cat People (1944)

Only one film from Val Lewton's B-horror unit at RKO in 1944? Not exactly a prodigious output. Happily, The Curse Of The Cat People, directed by Robert Wise, is one of the finest of the series.

Unwilling as ever to have his name attached to the kind of junk his bosses at RKO wanted him to produce, Val Lewton's second Cat People film is very nearly a sequel in name only, despite retaining the three surviving leads from the original. The were-cat element is entirely absent, but the sexual psychology is back in spades. Kent Smith worries that his six year old daughter may have a tendency toward madness similar to that of his neurotic and now deceased first wife, Simone Simon. Apparently he's forgotten that the woman did actually turn into a cat just like she feared she would, and even if she had been mad, couldn't have infected his daughter with it, because the girl is not her's, but second wife Jane Randolph's, sexual dysfunction having been at the root of all the previous trouble. Permanently marked by the earlier traumatic relationship, Smith seems to consider the girl to somehow be the spiritual offspring of the dead woman, which suggests that the problem may in fact be with him and not her at all. The child's imaginary friend/surrogate mother is played by Simon, but is she a ghost, or the personification of Smith's own projected fear of feminine madness, given form by an imaginative little girl?

It's a marvellous little film. Lyrical is the word that tends to come up in reviews, and it's as good a way of summing the experience up as any. It is also the end of an era. Val Lewton would produce three more horror films for RKO, but they would be of a very different sort: period costume dramas with somewhat higher budgets befitting a name star, Boris Karloff. Karloff reportedly enjoyed the experience immensely and became friends with Lewton, grateful as he was to be playing something other than a mad scientist, in films that he considered to be among the best of his career. I suspect those three films are closer to the kinds of movies Lewton would have produced all along if he'd had the resources: very good ones, but tailored to suit his new leading man, and none of them resonate as strongly with me as the five preceding them.