page_title: The Curse of the Cat People
section_title: Production
hierarchical_section_title: The Curse of the Cat People / Production
caption_attribution_description: English: In this portrait, the sitter is the son of the Count and Countess of Altamira. In a splendid red costume, he is shown playing with a pet magpie (which holds the painter's calling card in its beak), a cage full of finches, and three wide-eyed cats. The portrait has also been known as the "Red Boy" since the early twentieth century.
context_page_description: The Curse of the Cat People is a 1944 American fantasy film directed by Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise, produced by Val Lewton, and starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith, and Jane Randolph. Its plot follows Amy, a young girl who befriends the ghost of her father's deceased first wife, Irena, a Serbian fashion designer who descended from a race of people who could transform into cats. The film, which marks Wise's first directing credit, is a sequel to Cat People and has many of the same characters. However, it is only tangentially related to its predecessor.
context_section_description: The Curse of the Cat People, which began production at the RKO Gower Street studios in Hollywood on August 26, 1943 and stopped on October 4 of that year, with additional shooting in the week of November 21, marked two directorial debuts. Gunther von Fritsch had only directed short subjects to that time, so the film marked his feature debut, but when he fell behind schedule, having gotten only halfway through the screenplay in the 18 days of filming that had been allocated, the studio assigned film editor Robert Wise to take over, which earned him his first directorial credit. When it wrapped, the film, which had done some location shooting at Malibou Lake, California, was nine days behind schedule, and had cost so much that its budget was raised from $147,000 to $212,000. As was usual with Lewton's films, the tight budget demanded the re-use of sets, here from Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), as had already been done with the predecessor Cat People.
  Although sharing some of the same cast and characters and marketed as a sequel to 1942's Cat People, the film has little relationship to the earlier one. RKO studio executives wanted to cash in on the success of the first film, and insisted on keeping the title, despite producer Val Lewton's desire to change it to Amy and Her Friend. Lewton had incorporated elements of his own life into the film, integrating autobiographical details from his childhood, such as the party invitations that are "mailed" by putting them into a hollow tree. Lewton also grew up not far from Tarrytown, where the story is set, and was fond of ghost stories such as "The Headless Horseman" (Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow") which is cited in The Curse of the Cat People.
  Studio executives were disappointed when Lewton screened his final cut for them, and insisted on some additional scenes, such as the one of the boys chasing a black cat, being filmed and inserted into the picture.  At the same time, some details which were crucial to the plot were lost in the re-editing necessary to accommodate the new scenes.
caption: Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga by Goya, 1787–88
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