Hondo - 1953

The Cat Girl - 1957: A direct lift from Lewton's 1942 The Cat People, this film takes it for granted the psychological dilemmas that you have when your family is full of legends of shape-changing, and the story here speeds the star (Barbara Shelley as Leonora Johnson), however reluctant she is about her 'curse,' onward to her destiny of becoming a "cat-woman."

What the film lacks in subtlety and imagination it tries to make up for with a more crudely performed exploration of the theme of the earlier Lewton film, which are simply the hazards of being a cat-person. One advantage this film has it reaches deeper into the sense of mental instability and the threat from there being lethal cats on the loose, because not only is our monster a shape-changer, but there's also a separate leopard on the loose that she can control.

Developing the sense of mental dysfunction, the director (
Alfred Shaughnessy) shows us Shelley (whose work here is probably the single highest quality element to the production) in a straight-jacket, being shown in terror after commitment to a mental institution, and pulling out all the stops to convince us the pain and terror is real. This was something we didn't see Simone Simon have to face in the moodier 1942 film, but Shelley's anguish and fear over not just becoming a monster but, in effect, losing her identity and sense of self-control, is more palpable than anything Lewton intimated in his template movie.

The Cat Girl doesn't have many more ambitions than to retell Lewton's story, turn the horror up (and the adultery among the characters) to eleven, and to let Shelley try for being the constant center of our attention. In the case of the latter, it works. The rest of the cast does its job but without a lot of opportunities to break out of the mold of dry melodrama, though. The cinematography and direction is perfectly fine and interesting at times, but hampered by a script that is either too chained to the basic outline of Lewton's original or not inspired enough to break free. Either way The Cat Girl's originality is in filling in the gaps of Lewton's story. Barbara Shelley is the highlight here and puts enough energy into some of the scenes to yank the film up to a higher level, briefly, making this viewer wonder what could've been.

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