The Curse of the Cat People (1944)

The Curse of the Cat People (1944) is both a child’s fantasy and a tale of the supernatural, where the worlds of children and adults are separate and cause misunderstanding, even trauma, when they collide.  The adult most affectionate and sympathetic with little Ann Carter is a ghost.  Ann must navigate frustration, terror, even near tragedy before she finds acceptance, peace, and contentment with her parents.

The sequel to Cat People (1942), producer Val Lewton’s landmark low-budget horror film, The Curse of the Cat People brings back Kent Smith and Jane Randolph, lovers who are now married; and Simone Simon, as the ghost of the character she played in Cat People, who had been the first wife of Kent Smith. I won’t go into the plot of Cat People as it has only a cursory relationship to The Curse of the Cat People.  The story does pick up where the first movie left off (six years later, when Kent Smith and Jane Randolph now have a little daughter), but, refreshingly, it constitutes a new chapter in the adventures of the characters (plus a new star), and not just a repetition of events in the previous movie as happens so often in sequels. 

The directorial debut of Robert Wise, who took over from Gunther von Fritsch, the movie is a delicate psychological puzzle from the viewpoint of a sensitive and lonely six-year-old girl played by the captivatingly natural Ann Carter.  We see at once that her imagination, which has her trying to make friends with a butterfly, makes her an outsider when it comes to the company of other children, who think she’s weird.  Her parents, particularly her father, is disturbed by this. He wants her to make friends with other kids, not to live in a dream world, and just be normal like everyone else.  His late first wife was affected by what he felt were mad and self-destructive delusions, resulting in her tragic death.  He is afraid that a similar calamity will fall on his family again if his daughter doesn’t snap out it.  We may forgive his impatience, even anger, towards the little girl because we see he’s clearly frightened.  It’s not easy to control a six-year-old under the best of circumstances, and Kent Smith’s need to control his daughter’s behavior is probably more indicative of his own psychological illness than her daydreaming is hers.

Kent Smith is appealing in the role, able to display a dictatorial attitude in a way that suggests he really loves his daughter but he’s been traumatized by his past – another actor might just seem bossy and mean where Smith comes off as really more skittish.  Mr. Smith had a lot of stage experience, was handsome, but perhaps a certain aloofness on screen and lack of that – for want of a better term, glamor of some male stars like Clark Gable or Tyrone Power, kept him from being a major star.  Joseph Cotten had some similar qualities, but had better luck at being chosen for a few romantic leads that increased his stature.  I think there was among 1940s male stars a kind of wistful melancholy that seems strikingly different from the brash charmers of the 1930s – Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, Kent Smith, Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, Robert Walker.  Maybe you can think of others.  The war made us more introspective and less certain about our world, and our young men – even the ones who did not go to war – reflected our skittishness.  Perhaps the ones who did not go to war were even more uncertain about themselves.  So Kent Smith’s character in this movie is not an enemy to the little girl, but a reflection of the baffling and sometimes scary world she lives in.

The world children live in is really the world we adults make for them.  We say that a child is “living in her own little world,” but that’s not really true; she’s just coping with the one we gave her.  Part of Ann Carter’s trauma is she’s not able to follow the rules the grownups give her because the grownups keep changing the rules.  Her father told her a playful story of a cavity in a nearby tree being a magic mailbox to another world. She took him at his word, and put her birthday party invitations into the tree to be delivered to her schoolmates.  When the mail was, obviously, not delivered, no one showed up to the party.  Friends were mad not to be invited.  Daddy’s furious because she did a dumb thing and because she’s alienated the other children even more, and he wants a normal kid, dang it.

A strange old lady down the street gives her a ring.  Ann’s parents’ houseman, played by Sir Lancelot, who appeared in Brute Force (1947) which we discussed here, tells her it is a wishing ring.  (We are treated to a brief calypso tune in his chirpy tenor over the sound of him vacuuming.)  She wishes for a friend.  Ann Carter breaks your heart with the simple expression of deep yearning and profound loneliness.

The friend appears, a beautiful lady draped in a light-colored cape, more like an angel and less like a ghost.  They play in the backyard, and the lady, who is Irena, is gentle and motherly, and little Ann is ecstatic.  That the woman happens to be the vision of her father’s first crazy wife is a little awkward.  Dad wants her to stop talking about her imaginary friend, and when she shows him a photo she has found of his first wife and says that’s her, that’s the imaginary friend – it gives Kent the willies and his takes it out on Ann.  He brings her out in the backyard and tells her she must say she does not see Irena.  The kid may believe in fantasies, but she’s not a liar.  She stalwartly announces she does see her.  Dad spanks her.

Fortunately, we are not shown the physical punishment, because that would be too much for us to bear.  Children often fear what will not harm them: the dark, or monsters that don’t exist.  But spankings and beatings are real.  Here is where the real world encroaches on Ann’s already traumatized make-believe one.

Even her kindergarten teacher, played by Eve March, who seems so sympathetic to Ann and reacts to her daydreaming with intelligence and tact, seems cavalier about the spanking and gives it no importance.  There is no grownup Ann can rely on to come to her aid. 

Except the old lady who gave her the ring.

Who’s nuts herself.

Julia Dean masterfully plays old Mrs. Farren, who had been a grand stage actress in her youth.  Though infirm, she still carries the panache of a life in front of the footlights, and entertains Ann in her spooky old mansion with tales of The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.  They live in the village of Tarrytown, New York, where Washington Irving set his tale of Ichabod Crane.  At the film’s climax, Ann runs away, crossing the bridge where Ichabod met his fate, and she experiences the full force of eerie imagination run wild.

The move is rife with ghosts.  It is moody and atmospheric. It is filled with terrors of the imagination.  And yet…Halloween intersects with Christmas.  We have presents under the tree.  Ann buys a decorative pin, wraps it up and gives it to Irena for a present.  She pins it to her cape, delighted, and in return, presents Ann with a fantastic crystal illusion in her backyard, courtesy of the lighting guy.

When the caroling neighbors come in to sit at the piano and lumber through “Shepherd Shake off Your Drowsy Sleep,” Irena sings over them the enchanting, “Il Est Né, Le Divin Enfant.”

Is this a Christmas story or a ghost story?  There is no reason it should not be both.  The most majestic secular Christmas story ever written was a ghost story: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.  In the very first lines he writes, “Marley was dead: to begin with…There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.”

Christmas is full of mysteries.  There is the greatest mystery of the Child being born in Bethlehem.  And there are the hundreds of mysteries that we manufacture to celebrate the season: folk tales, old ornaments that seem magical, and we are revisited by the ghosts of loved ones who have passed with every task we take whether it's decorating or baking or whatever we do that reminds us of our own Christmases past.

Perhaps the grandest mystery, or we might even call it a conspiracy, is the perpetuation of Santa Claus.  We adults set up an elaborate behavioral control system whereby the child must be good or Santa will not bring presents.  He knows when we are sleeping, he knows when we’re awake.  That’s pretty creepy.  He climbs down chimneys and still manages to get into our home even if we don’t have one.  We tell the kids to leave cookies and milk, carrots for the reindeer.  A friend of mine as a child was told to leave a bottle of beer for Santa.  Santa is as picky as he is mysterious.

We bring our kids to sit on his lap for a photo, and the child bears it as best he can, terrified of this big, fat, stranger who is, let’s face, just another kind of clown, and clowns are scary.  We tell the kids they must be good or face the wrath of Santa and the ignominy of not getting a gift.  How ironic, and cruel, in a world where not getting a lot of presents is considered shameful, for both the child and the parent.  We set up two impossible goals: one, that the child will be good as gold when we can’t even be good all the time ourselves; and two, that if we can't actually afford to give many presents then we are shamed, too.

Since Clement Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” we’ve been conjuring and nurturing the fairy tale.  NORAD follows Santa on radar every year.  The Post Office has a box for letters to the North Pole.  Even the good Dr. Fauci announced that he visited Santa, checked him out, gave him his vaccination, and he’s good to go.  No fear of COVID for the jolly old soul.

We are disappointed when our young children no longer believe; however, if Junior got to be, say, 15 years old and still believed, we’d tell him to grow up and knock it off.  Of all the mysteries of Christmas a child must endure, there is none so baffling as the inconsistency of grownups.

Of all the explanations of Santa that ever were, I think the best is still Francis Church’s reply to eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon in his editorial in the New York Sun, September 21, 1897. She wanted to know if there was really a Santa Claus, because her friends were getting to be the doubtful age and she wanted an authoritative answer.  I can’t tell you how pleased I am she turned to the Fourth Estate. 

Mr. Church’s famous “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus…” described the existence of Santa in the form of the intangibles of the season and of life…love, kindness, generosity, curiosity…and mystery. It is probably the most famous editorial ever written, and numerous American newspapers reprint it every year on Christmas Day.  Here is a link to Virginia’s letter to the editor and the editor’s reply.

(By the way, Sleepy Hollow, is a village that officially adopted the name in 1996 because…why not?  You have to do something to legitimize the place for the tourists who come there.  The high school’s mascot The Headless Horseman.  The story was written just a few years before Clement Clarke Moore wrote "T'was the night before Chrismtas..."  It isn’t just Santa we go to great lengths to make real.)

But Kent Smith is not so deft at understanding as the editor Mr. Church of the succor of imagination because to him it has always brought pain, and the pressure he exhorts on his little girl drives her to run away out into a snowstorm.  She finds her way to Mrs. Farren’s house, where the old lady is in the throes of a wild psychological trauma herself.  Though she lives with her grown daughter, played by Elizabeth Russell, she is under the delusion that Miss Russell is a stranger, that her real daughter died when a child about Ann’s age, which explains her attachment to little Ann.

She shuts out her real daughter, who is her caretaker, is rude and hateful to her, and Elizabeth Russell grows jealous of Ann.  In another scary twist, the old lady dies with the exertion of climbing a staircase, and Elizabeth nearly strangles Ann in a fit of morbid resentment.  Elizabeth’s trauma from earliest childhood, living with a mother who denied her, must have been extreme.  Another sequel could probably have been launched with her story. 

Ann, with the sudden shock of sensing real and present danger – which is the first sign we are growing up, to be able to distinguish such a thing – fears Elizabeth and calls for help, calls for her friend, the ghost.

Fantasy returns when Irena appears, superimposed over the threatening figure of Elizabeth, covering her angry scowl and lined face with her angelic expression.  Ann is relieved and runs to who she thinks is Irena for a hug.  She embraces Elizabeth, and for a tense moment, the bony hands that were going to choke her relax, and Elizabeth experiences the unaccustomed gesture of affection.  Almost overwhelming to her, she walks away from the child, just as the police and Kent Smith show up, having tracked the girl in the snow.

When Dad, carrying her in his arms all the way home, asks her again if she sees Irena in the backyard, and Ann, still not a liar, says yes, she sees her, this time Dad says he sees her, too.

He doesn’t.  He’s lying.  He’s learned that pretending is okay, and if it really is the ghost of Irena, she gave them all a really nice Christmas gift. 

The script is by DeWitt Bodeen, who also gave us Cat People, The Enchanted Cottage (1945) which we discussed here, and I Remember Mama (1948) before going on to do a lot of television work.  Crafting such a gossamer story that plays just a little over an hour is amazing, and probably one of the movie’s strengths. 

Ann Carter, who commands the movie in nearly every scene, went on to do only a handful of films, among them The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947) and I Married a Witch (1942) discussed here, before her career was cut short when she contracted polio.  She later went to college to become a teacher, married and had a family. 

We are in the midst of resurrecting Christmases past under a very different set of circumstances this year.  I hope you may find some comfort and pleasure in the solitude and physical aloneness you must seek and maintain for your own good and the good of everyone else.

To pass the time, allow me to offer a free eBook.  My novel Meet Me in Nuthatch is a comic, poignant tale of a small town that needs a jump start, and the Christmas tree farmer up the road has a nutty idea about reenacting the town as it was in 1904 that just might help.  Follow this universal link to obtain the eBook on your choice of online shops: Apple, Barnes & Noble, Scrbd, 24 Symbols, Playster, or Vivlio.  The eBook will be free until January 6, 2021.

Merry Christmas!

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of AnnBlyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.  Her new book, a collection of posts from this blog - Hollywood Fights Fascism - is available here on Amazon.