Review of Curse of the Cat People

(Above: Amy in the opening scene with her butterfly friend.)

B Plus

By Manny Farber
From The Nation
March 20, 1944

THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE is a Val Lewton produced B-picture about a problem child which is a sound educational aid to parents, an occasionally delicately exact portrait of a child, and so sincerely adult-minded in its whole approach as to make it the least Hollywood-like film from Hollywood this year. Its problem has a startling dignity and human signficance for a Hollywood movie— being about a child (Ann Carter) who worries or antagonizes the people around her with her day-dreaming: the more she antagonizes them the more she is forced back on the people of her fantasies for "friends." When she finds an old photograpth of her father's deceased, psychopathic first wife, she sees her as one of her fantasied "friends," and the father is afraid his daughter has become mentally ill and is under a curse. His insistence that she stoo daydreaming brings About the climax, and the film's conclusion is that he should have more trust and faith in his daughter and her visions.

The entire writing and production of the film are surprisingly devoted to the interests of a sincere understanding of its problem. It is no textbook on the reason and development of childhood day-dreamers, but its ideas, I think, are unusually adequate and its motivations logically and subtly developed. The box-office connection it makes to the earlier "Cat People" and its use of a conventional plot-enlivener about a haunted house are too melodramatic for the picture's needs, but even with these there has been a real effort to work them into the theme with convincing psychological presence and relationship. Much of the characterization is Iacking in the usual synthetic trappings and romantic aids, and technically the picture was produced with sensitivity and thought. On its naturalistic level, "The Curse of the Cat People" lacks sufficient life in the signficance of its insights into reality, and the playing, which it on the stiff, precarious side of naturalism, doesn't compensate for this sterility with enough vitality to make it an artistic dream movie. But it has so much more dignity than the other Hollywood films around that it seems at this moment inordinately wholesome.

Besides its general respect for intelligence, it has the ability to convey at times the exact quality of certain states of childhood. It is especially good in getting across the delicacy and warm enchantment surrounding the girl in her day-dreaming, through close-ups and the lighting of her face and blond hair. There are a few extraordinary moments in the treatment of these episodes— one of them when the girl sits by the pond in her yard, friendless and in the first stage of reverie, and dips her hand idly through the water: the symbolized view of her arm in and out of the water produces a very strange, almost macabre, visual impression. At another time there is a fine use of sound and constructions of shadows that build a very convlncing accompaniment to the child's nightmare. The Iyrical use of people, sound and light when the child's daydreamed friend appears, and the scenes between the two, in spite of the burleyque discordancy of the treatment of Simone Simon— in an amazing garment— are excellent compared to some similar vision-producingain "The Song of Bernadette." The performance of the girl in "The Curse of the Cat People," which is not remarkable, is still less wooden and more passionate than Jennifer Jones's in "Bernadette." They do, for instance, some fine things here with the small girl's walks toward and within the haunted house— capturing the right degree of fascination and fear.

The quality of these moments throws the sterility of the characterization of a number of other important items of the picture into an even more pronounced light— the un-Hollywood-treated parents are also uncharacterized– beyond their looking exactly like the young married pair that used always to come on in small-town movie advertisemen~for the local grocer or shoe store; also their home, their daughter's school life and her schoolteacher have the iame ideal innocuousness. Still, whatever its lack of vitality, it hasn't the sickly green cast of the usual superficial Hollywood

Note:
I copied this review from the clipping in Lewton's scrapbook at the Library of Congress. Typically Lewton filled the pages of his scrapbooks with various clippings and notes, but this particular review was given a whole page all by itself. - Erik

(Above: Amy after the demise of her butterfly.)

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