by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two years after Cat People. Lewton, Bodeen and two new directors – Gunther von Fritsch, a documentarian whom Lewton gave the opportunity to make his first fiction film, only to fire him midway through the shoot and replace him with former editor Robert Wise, who would go on to a long career making major films like The Day the Earth Stood Still, I Want to Live!, West Side Story (co-directed with Jerome Robbins, who’d directed the original stage production) and The Sound of Music, teamed up for what RKO tried to pass off as a sequel to Cat People called The Curse of the Cat People even though the two films have virtually nothing in common except three characters and a similarly shadowy approach. It takes place long enough after Cat People for Oliver Reed and Alice Moore to have got married and had a six-year-old daughter, Amy (Ann Carter, who was eight when she made this film). They’ve also moved out of New York City to Tarrytown in upstate New York, famous as the location of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and Hawthorne’s tale of the headless horseman figures prominently in the film. Amy is a lonely, alienated child whose attempts to make friends her own age keep going wrong. She invites the neighbor kids to her sixth birthday party, but none of them show up because instead of mailing the invitations in a real mailbox, she left them in a hollow tree stump because three years earlier her father Oliver had told her it was a “magic mailbox.” Naturally the other children are upset because Amy promised them she’d invite them to her birthday party but they never received the invitations.
Amy is a child who spends much of her time alone, dreaming and inventing fictitious friends because she doesn’t have any real ones. Though the child in The Curse of the Cat People is a girl instead of a boy, the film is largely autobiographical; as a child, Val Lewton himself had a birthday party to which no one showed up because he’d put the invitations in a hollow tree stump thinking it was a “magic mailbox.” Her only confidant is her parents’ Black manservant, Edward – played by the marvelous Black calypso singer Sir Lancelot, whom Lewton had brought to Hollywood for I Walked With a Zombie two years earlier. Knowing that calypso singers in Jamaica and Trinidad often sang topical songs about the current events on those islands, Lewton asked Sir Lancelot to write a similar song about the events of I Walked With a Zombie as if they were really happening. The result was “Shame and Scandal,” which was a good enough song the Black folksinger Odetta covered it in the late 1950’s. Though in The Curse of the Cat People Sir Lancelot is down to the traditional servant role Black people played in Hollywood movies, he’s portrayed in such a way that he seems more like one of the family than the traditional dumb, shuffling stereotype to which most Black actors were then relegated. It was a shock when I first saw the film Happy Go Lucky, a 1942 Paramount production made just before Sir Lancelot’s three films for Lewton (he was also in the long-lost The Ghost Ship), in which he had to play the usual demeaning stereotype. One of the things I most love about Lewton is his treatment of people of color in his films, which was miles ahead of how most filmmakers of the time used them. Actors of color who got cast in Lewton productions got to play rich, detailed characters, and Lewton frequently built the prejudices against them into his plots in order to condemn it. Like John Huston, Val Lewton was anti-racist well before anti-racism was cool.
The Curse of the Cat People also features two dysfunctional families, the Reeds and the Farrens. The Farrens are long-retired actress Julia Farren (Julia Dean) and her daughter Barbara (Elizabeth Russell). Lewton clearly based Julia Farren on his real-life aunt, silent-screen star Alla Nazimova, who in the ‘teens built herself a lavish mansion called The Garden of Allah and by the 1930’s her financial state had fallen so low she was reduced to renting a single room in the mansion she had once owned outright – a very Lewtonian plot situation. Julia has become convinced that her daughter Barbara is actually an impostor and the real Barbara died when she was only six (by coincidence, Amy’s age in the plot). Julia wraps a ring around a handkerchief and throws it out to Amy when she walks by the old house where she and Barbara live, and she calls out to her to visit in ways that to a modern audience make her seem like either a wicked witch or a child molester, but they’re actually only the importunings of an old, eccentric woman – though thank goodness DeWitt Bodeen avoided the obvious plot device of having Julia hallucinate that Amy was in fact her long-lost daughter Barbara.
Amy’s main interaction in the film comes when she gets a supernatural visit from a young, attractive woman who turns out to be Irena Dubrovna (once again played by Simone Simon), her father’s first wife. It’s not clear just how Irena, who died before Amy was born, came into Amy’s consciousness (or subconsciousness) when she’s never met her nor seen a photograph until one spills out of Oliver’s end-table drawer and Amy asks her dad, “Oh, so you know my friend, too?” Oliver, thinking he’s doing the right thing, burns all the extant photos of Irena except for one showing the two of them together, and of course Amy sees that and concludes that her new friend is someone her dad knows. Irena makes three visits to Amy in the garden of the house, and the two repeat the line “Amy … and her friend” so often Val Lewton actually asked for permission to change the film’s title to Amy and Her Friend, but the executives in RKO’s marketing department wanted to sell it as a sequel to Cat People and wouldn’t let him. Oddly, the film was so well known in the psychiatric community it was frequently shown to psych classes to show would-be psychiatrists how to diagnose this form of mental illness in children – and Robert Wise recalled being at such a screening in which he was asked, “I love the movie, but why does it have such a horrible title?” Wise also said that real-life psychiatrists praised the way Ann Carter as Amy kept her mouth tightly shut throughout the film, opening it just enough to speak when she needed to. The psychiatrists explained that this was precisely the expression real-life children with the mental illness Amy is depicted as having in the film show, and Wise had to explain to them that the closed-mouth face wasn’t something they had intended Ann Carter to do deliberately. Instead, she had lost a tooth just before the shoot and Val Lewton’s budget didn’t have the money to do dental work on her.
It’s not really fair to describe The Curse of the Cat People as a sequel because it isn’t one; it’s a rich, beautifully made film about an introverted child and how she is finally brought out of her shell by friends, both real and imaginary. It’s full of marvelous touches, including the ritual surrounding Amy’s first spanking – her dad gives it to her very reluctantly while her mom and her grade-school teacher, Miss Callahan (Eve March), treat it as a rite of passage. (Miss Callahan quite often visits the Reeds at home to check up on Amy, something it’s almost impossible to imagine today’s overworked, underpaid and disrespected teachers doing!) There’s even a scene in which Amy is singing on the staircase of the Reeds’ home, and though she’s virtually tuneless one of the adults in the movie tells her that even when it’s not done well, singing can be a positive form of emotional release – and we feel like we’ve been flash-forward to the same director’s The Sound of Music 22 years later. The two movies make an odd pairing even though they’re nominally part of the same story sequence, but both films are full of Lewton’s quirks and the marvelous spells his and his collaborators built around their characters so they seem like real people you could get to love (or maybe not-so-much love) in terms of how you interacted with them. It’s quite a beautiful film and it’s one with a strong identification factor for me, too, since i was also a shy kid, often bullied (as Amy is in at least two scenes in the film) and rarely able to connect with people my own age until, ironically, I got into high school and was able to find enough fellow misfits to have something of a social life and come out of my shell so I wasn’t the nerdy kid shown in this film and described in songs like the Beach Boys’ “In My Room” and the Beatles’ “There’s a Place,” the first Beatles song I ever liked because I identified with the line, “There’s a place where I can go/When I feel low, when I feel blue/And it’s my mind” – and the moment John Lennon sang “And it’s my mind,” he had me.
