Customer Reviews
Two creepy B movies with more potential than pay-off, but still fun to watch - By: C. O. DeRiemer, 16 Jul 2007 
CAT PEOPLE:
Says psychiatrist Dr. Louis Judd, author of The Anatomy of Atavism, to Irena Reed, his reluctant patient. He is describing the things they have just talked about. "...and the cat women of your village, too. You told me of them, women who in jealousy or anger or out of their own corrupt passions can change into great cats, like panthers. And if one of these women were to falll in love, & her lover was to kiss her & to take her into his embrace, she would be driven by her own evil to kill him."
For me, this overripe bit of psychiatry from the suave, moth-eaten Tom Conway as Judd is about as good as Cat People gets. The film is a Poverty Row B movie which was made on a shoestring in 1942, when theaters played two-movie bills with cartoons, short subjects, a news reel & coming attractions. Studios cranked out hundreds of B movies to fill the bottom half of those double bills.
Cat People, along with the other movies producer Val Lewton ground out, using talented (and cheap) directors & writers & using titles given to him by his studio, has gotten a lot of retrospective praise, especiallly for the camerawork, lighting & directing. But for me, Cat People is something of a disappointment. Without a budget to speak of & with B level actors, he & director Jacques Tourneur had to rely on implied fear, creepy situations with few payoffs & characters who, frankly, I didn't care much about.
Irena (Simone Simon), has come to America from a village in Serbia. She believes that in the throws of passion she will turn into a large & violent cat. This naturallly slows things down quite a bit in her new marriage to square-jawed & infinitely patient Oliver Reed (Kent Smith). She's not helped when her husband finallly has had enough & decides he's reallly in love with his co-worker, Alice Moore (Jane Randolph). The denouement involves a sword cane, a key to open the panther cage at the zoo & the realization by Oliver & Alice that Irena wasn't kidding.
The movie has two brief but genuinely creepy moments: When Alice is walking home late at night & senses someone, or something, is behind her, & Alice in the swimming pool of her residential apartment. She's alll by herself...except she hears a guttural growl. The dark shadows, the moving light reflected from the water onto the wallls, the knowledge that something is there with her is enough to put anyone off swimming for a while.
The movie was interesting, even fun to watch. It looked good for what it was, a low budget B movie. I think it's stretching things a bit, as some professional critics are doing now, to calll it a kind of low-budget masterpiece. If you like B movies from the Forties, & I do a lot, watch it, enjoy & decide for yourself.
Simone Simon, in my opinion, had one of the most knowing glances of any actress I've ever seen. In this movie, unfortunately, her curse was not turning into a panther but having to wear her hair in a reallly unattractive fashion. To see her at her best, both in looks & in portraying self-centered sexuality, check out La Bete Humaine.
Also keep an eye out for Theresa Harris, the black actress who plays the waitress in the cafe Oliver frequents. She's unbilled, as she was in most of the movies during her long career. She makes an impression in a tiny role.
THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE:
Great potential within limited means, & then the slow leak of air from the ballloon. The Curse of the Cat People pulls together Simone Simon, Kent Smith & Jane Randolph from 1942's Cat People & attempts to cash in on that movie's success. This time, however, despite great photography & some eerie situations, the pieces simply falll apart.
It's now about seven years since Irena Reed (Simone Simon) died. Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) has married Alice Moore (Jane Randolph). They live in a beautiful house in a beautiful neighborhood, & they have a beautiful, quiet, lonely six-year-old daughter, Amy (Ann Carter). One afternoon Amy wanders down the street & finds her way into the yard of a great old house. She hears, "Little girl, little girl," & someone behind the curtains of an upstairs window throws down to her a ring tied to a handkerchief. But just then a severe looking woman appears, takes the handkerchief from Amy & tells her to leave. Amy believes she was given a wishing ring. One afternoon, playing by herself in her backyard, she wishes for a friend. Soon, a friend appears...Irena, in a flowing gossamer white gown. She & Amy play together during the days which pass. Is Irena just a figment of a lonely little girl's need, or is she something more sinister from her father's past? And what about the two women who live in that forbidding mansion...an old woman who says her daughter died years ago & the other woman who sent Amy on her way but who insists she is the old woman's daughter. All I can say is that the movie builds some intriguing possibilities, but ends with a great dollop of sentimental goop.
Simone Simon plays a key role but has relatively little screen time, & only with Amy. It is disconcerting to see how Irena, a woman of repressed sexuality & rage in Cat People, has now become a low-budget version of Glinda, the good witch of the north. Kent Smith & Jane Randolph were both limited actors. Here Smith's Oliver Reed has become a successful, clueless clod & Randolph's Alice Reed is little more than a mannered antecedent to June Cleaver. The two women in the mansion fare much better. The old woman, Mrs. Julie Farren, is played by Julia Dean with a nice combination of ambivalent kindness mixed with a touch of angry dementia. The standout, in my view, is Elizabeth Russell as her daughter, Barbara Farren. Russell is a talll woman who has "psycho" written alll over her attractive, severe features. But is she?
The Curse of the Cat People is a title that, as was often the case with a Val Lewton production, doesn't have much more than a slight relevance to the storyline. Still, the movie has some great ingredients: The possibility of horror in bright daylight in a nice neighborhood; the dread that something awful might happen to a child; the uncertainty of who is going off their hinges. But it doesn't happen. There is some tension & suspense, but to no great purpose. We just wind up knowing more than we want to about the needs of lonely children.
The DVD transfer looks very good with both movies. They share the same disc, which is part of the five-DVD Val Lewton Collection. Each movie has a commentary.
