Wise Watch: The Curse of the Cat People (1944)

Watched:  01/14/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Gunther von Fritsch / Robert Wise

We're continuing on with movies directed by Robert Wise - our gameplan for 2026.   

In his first outing directing, Wise did some pick-ups for The Magnificent Ambersons while Orson Welles was out of the country.  Here for his second, Wise was tapped in after director Gunther von Fritsch was let go from The Curse of the Cat People (1944) for going over time and over budget at the notoriously tight-fisted RKO.  

I don't know what work belongs to Wise and which to von Fritsch here, so we'll just talk in generalities.

As Jamie said after the movie wrapped "that was a wholly unnecessary sequel", which is absolutely true.  I'd argue The Leopard Man is more of a spiritual sequel to The Cat People than this movie - but it *does* feature our heroes from the first movie, and Irena (Simone Simon) in ghostly form.

This takes place something less than a decade after The Cat People, which ends with Irena's death and the certainty our dopey guy, Ollie (Kent Smith), is going to land the to-good-for-him co-worker, Alice (Jane Randolph) when Irena has gone to the litter box in the sky.

Here, they're married and living in Tarrytown, New York, and have produced a daughter, Amy (Ann Carter), who is six.  Amy is a sensitive, flighty child who can't seem to make friends and lives in her own imagination.  Fortunately, Ollie is just as much of a dipstick as a father as he was as Irena's husband (run, Alice), and because Irena was either schizophrenic or really would turn into a cat post-coitus, he's decided his daughter's ability to entertain herself is a *problem* because she's also giving in to imagination.  Amazing dad-work, Ollie.

Amy comes across a spook old Victorian seemingly imported from another movie (and literally using set components from The Magnificent Ambersons) where she meets an old lady (Julia Dean) who is clearly suffering from dementia and case of being a former stage actress.  The lady's adult daughter (Elizabeth Russell) is left to care for her mother in the mansion - while the mother claims she's an imposter.  It is some serious Gothic Literature/ Grey Gardens stuff.   

In Amy's hour of darkness, in her hour of need, Irena comes to her as a vision, and it is weird indeed.  And, in a suspiciously well-fitted princess dress, no less, while everyone else is dressed in standard non-showy 1944 garb.  

Anyway - it's mostly *not* a horror movie.  It's a movie about a special little kid who is just wired different, and her dad having beef with anyone acting remotely different.  Irena is not up to anything nefarious - it's like Val Lewton felt like she needed some kind of happily-ever-after.  But the stuff at the old mansion is very much classic Val Lewton weirdness.  Like...  the lady just *telling* Amy about the Headless Horseman is spooky stuff, as well as the misery that happens in the house the second Amy departs.  Credit to Julia Dean for going all in as Mrs. Farran and Elizabeth Russell for a tight little character arc in her limited scenes.  

There's also a house servant, Edward, played by calypso musician Sir Lancelot (he also appeared in I Walked With a Zombie).  

But, yeah, it's a weird movie.  Not really horror so much as a meditation on imaginative youth, and maybe wish-fulfillment that straight-laced dads would have given those kids (Lewton, cough cough) a bit more understanding.

I suspect some of the lovely footage in the Farran house is the work of Wise - both from his observation of the work on those sets in Amberson, but also based on what he did with The Haunting almost two decades later.