A haunting, unusual film and one of the all-time great movie sequels. It feels less like a follow-up to 1942’s Cat People than like a wintry dream that someone had after seeing it. Like producer Val Lewton’s I Walked With a Zombie, the title and the poster art promise horror, but the film itself is more a spectral fairy tale. It’s a film for children, really. The three principle characters from the first movie are all back, with the same names and played by the same actors, but the continuity ends there. Despite the title, there are no killer cat people here. Val Lewton wanted to call this Amy and Her Friend, but RKO Pictures refused.
A lonely seven-year-old daydreamer, Amy (Ann Carter, giving one of the great child performances in American movies), makes two friends. One is a senile retired actress (Julia Dean) who lives in a decrepit house that everyone’s afraid to go near. The other friend is an angelic phantom woman played by Simone Simon, who is either the redeemed ghost of her character in the first Cat People or a figment of Amy’s active imagination.
It’s one of the most poetic films to come out of Hollywood in its day. Naturally, it was a box office failure, but its reputation has grown greatly over the years.
Two directors get credit here. Gunther von Fritsch was the first, but he fell several days behind schedule, so Val Lewton enlisted Robert Wise, a young editor whose only previous directing experience was shooting additional footage for The Magnificent Ambersons. Wise got the job done and would go on to become a major Hollywood director and a two-time Academy Award winner for West Side Story and The Sound of Music.