SOURCE: "The Seventh Victim: The 'Haunted Eyes' of Jean Brooks—Val Lewton, 1904-1951," in Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror, The Viking Press, 1973, pp. 7-100.

[In the following excerpt, Siegel discusses Lewton's career and the production histories of his films, from Cat People through The Curse of the Cat People.]

It is generally nonsensical to speak of producers as creators when, in all but a few cases, they were the enemies of creation. One of the exceptions was Lewton who, though credited only as producer, was unarguably the artistic creator and prime mover of his films. Apart from his last, troubled productions, Lewton's films were easily identifiable by their attention to detail, their unusually literate screenplays, their skillful, suggestive use of shadow and sound. Although his production unit at RKO was fully democratic, with each member having a full say on artistic matters, Lewton's eleven RKO films constitute an uncommonly personal body of work.

Lewton contributed a great deal to the screenplays of his films, from the original story-lines, which were often his, through the various drafts and revisions; and he always wrote the final shooting scripts himself. Lewton employed writers, although he really did not need them, for several reasons. As a literary man, he enjoyed the company of writers, and as a chronic dawdler, he often could not get projects into gear without some external stimulus. He would select a writer to work up one of his ideas and then, trained by his work at M-G-M publicity and his years at Selznick, he would take the writer's work, determine its strengths and reshape, often remake, the story to take advantage of its possibilities. It would be grossly unfair to conclude that Lewton's writers did not make important contributions to his films, but a look at the subsequent credits of those writers will show that none ever managed to match the quality of the work he did for Lewton.

Lewton never took screen credit for the writing of his films. When, at the end of his tenure at RKO, he was forced to take a writing credit, he used the old pseudonym Carlos Keith. He explained this apparent modesty in a note to his mother and sister. 'I have to laugh at both your ignorance of the "moom picture industry" as she industrates [sic]. I am and have always been a writer-producer. That does not always mean more money. The reason I do not ordinarily take credit for my very considerable work on my own scripts is that I have a theory that if I take credit, whenever I rewrite another writer's work, I can very properly be suspected of rewriting merely to get such credit.' So although it was not in Lewton's nature to impose his will upon his co-workers, he was able to maintain control over his films by participating in their writing as well as taking care to choose collaborators who were sympathetic to his personality and vision. Obviously Lewton proved to be a lasting influence on his directors. Years after the producer's death, each has attempted a return to making modest, Lewtonesque psychological suspense films—Jacques Tourneur in his excellent Night of the Demon, Robert Wise in the visually distinguished The Haunting, and Mark Robson in the unfortunate Daddy's Gone A-Hunting.

The first member of the new unit was selected not by Lewton but by the studio; nevertheless she became an important part of his early days at RKO. Jessie Ponitz, an attractive, outgoing young woman, was a member of the studio stenographic staff and had been working as secretary to a producer. Because she knew the studio so well, she had been assigned to help Lewton get acquainted with the lot and its facilities. Mrs Ponitz, who is now executive secretary to. Walter Mirisch of the Mirisch Corporation, was instantly affected by Lewton's gentleness, shyness and sensitivity, and became quite protective of him in the short time they worked together. Once Lewton told her, following a visit from some studio executives, 'It is extremely difficult for me to even shake hands with people.' As she recalls it, this was not so much a fear as a dislike of physical contact. It is paradoxical that Lewton, who gave so much of himself to others, who was emotionally so vulnerable, so accessible, could not stand being touched or patted on the back.

His associates throughout his career were aware of Lewton's aversion and respected it. However, they did once manage to play a rather spectacular practical joke on him. After the completion of shooting on one of his last RKO movies, there was the customary party. Some of the cast and crew managed to talk Jane Russell, who had been a sensation in The Outlaw in her Howard Hughes-designed bra and was under contract to the studio, into taking part in their prank. Just as the party was in full swing, Miss Russell appeared, in a radier Outlawish dress, and began slowly advancing towards Lewton. Those in on the joke saw to it that a path was cleared between the actress and the puzzled producer. As Miss Russell, arms clasped behind her back, slowly and slinkily manoeuvred herself towards Lewton, he heard her huskily murmuring, 'Look, no hands! No hands!'

Mrs Ponitz's feeling for Lewton increased when the unit actually began functioning and she was made to feel a key participant in their first project. 'Val always rewrote everything that his writers turned in; the last draft was always his. As his secretary, I would type up the final script before it was sent out to be duplicated. Val spent a great deal of time talking over the effectiveness of the characterisations and situations in the screenplays. He often asked me for my advice, making me feel as though I was contributing much more than I actually was. When he asked for your opinion, you felt that he seriously wanted to hear what you had to say. You felt so much a part of the picture he was making. It was the same with everybody else; there was a great sense of collaboration, although it was really, and finally, Val's work. After-wards, when you saw the finished movie on the screen, you felt that it all had something to do with you.'

The first writer chosen for the production unit was DeWitt Bodeen. The two men had met in 1941, while Lewton was still at Selznick. A production of Jane Eyre was in the works, and Lewton recalled having seen a play Bodeen had written about the Brontës called Embers at Haworth. Bodeen, who was then working as a reader in the RKO story department, was borrowed on Lewton's recommendation and signed on to serve as research assistant to Aldous Huxley, who was writing the Jane Eyre screenplay. It was Lewton, not Huxley, who supervised Bodeen's work, and a mutual respect grew out of their frequent discussions. When Lewton finally decided to accept the RKO offer, he told Bodeen to keep him in mind when the Selznick research job was finished.

Jacques Tourneur, director of the first three Lewton pictures, had known and admired the producer for a number of years. Tourneur, son of the great director of silent films, Maurice Tourneur, arrived in Hollywood in 1935 after directing four films in France, and signed a contract with M-G-M to direct shorts, something of a step backward in his career. For several years he toiled away on Pete Smith Specialties and John Nesbitt's Passing Parades until he was finally given a feature called They All Come Out, a semi-documentary about penitentiaries, cosponsored by the Department of Justice. Shortly after completing that film, Tourneur was assigned to direct the second unit of Selznick's A Tale of Two Cities, on which Lewton was also working, tightening the screenplay and checking for period authenticity. The two men had similar tastes, particularly a love of sailing, and quickly became friends, often spending boating weekends with their combined families. Tourneur went on to make several low budget movies in the early Forties, and then, when Lewton was setting up his unit at RKO, was called in to direct.

The final member of the initial Lewton group was editor Mark Robson. Robson had served as cutter for Orson Welles during the Mercury Theatre heyday at RKO, the period that produced Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. When Citizen Kane failed at the box-office and its director went to South America to work on the It's All True project, everybody associated with Welles was 'punished' by the studio. Many of those who could not be fired were demoted to working for the B-unit. Joseph Breen, former head of the censor board and RKO production head prior to Koerner, recommended Robson to Lew Ostrow, head of the B-unit, who in turn assigned him to work as cutter for the Lewton horror unit. Robson, well schooled in film technique, was expected to advise Lewton on any cinematic matters about which the producer might have questions.

In the years to come, other people would join this unit—directors Robert Wise and Gunther Von Fritsch, writers Ardel Wray and Josef Mischel, and secretary Verna De Mots. But in those first, pleasant days, only Tourneur, Robson, Bodeen and Mrs Ponitz sat in Lewton's office, listening to him spin stories, drinking Russian tea with strawberry jam, exchanging theories about film suspense and visual beauty, and awaiting word from Koerner's office as to what their first assignment would be.

TOM GRIES: I learned a great secret about film producing from Val. He always told me not to spread a small budget over five or six sets—instead pick the location where most of the action will be played and make that a real showpiece. Then make do with the rest of the scenes. One elaborate set makes a film look much richer than it deserves to look. Val was a very careful man; he knew how to spend money and how to put it on the screen. When I began directing television, all of the things he told me about producing low budget pictures were extremely helpful.

In an article for Films in Review, DeWitt Bodeen recalls the genesis of Lewton's first and probably most famous film, Cat People:

Val departed for RKO two weeks before I'd finished my work at Selznick's, and when I phoned him, as I had promised, he quickly made arrangements for me to be hired at RKO as a contract writer at the Guild minimum, which was then $75 a week. When I reported for work, he ran off for me some U.S. and British horror and suspense movies which were typical of what he did not want to do. We spent several days talking about possible subjects for the first script.

Mr Koerner, who had personally welcomed me on my first day at the studio, was of the opinion that vampires, werewolves and man-made monsters had been over-exploited and that 'nobody has done much with cats.' He added that he had successfully audience-tested a title he considered highly exploitable—Cat People. 'Let's see what you two can do with that,' he ordered.

When we were back in his office, Val looked at me glumly and said: 'There's no helping it—we're stuck with that title. If you want to get out now, I won't hold it against you.'

I had no intention of withdrawing, and he and I promptly started upon a careful examination of the cat in literature. There was more to be examined than we had expected. Val was one of the best-read men I've ever known, and the kind of avid reader who retains what he reads.

After we had both read everything we could find pertaining to the cat in literature, Val had virtually decided to make his first movie from a short story, Algernon Blackwood's Ancient Sorceries, which admirably lends itself to cinematic interpretation and could easily be re-titled Cat People. Negotiations had begun for the purchase of the screen rights when Val suddenly changed his mind.

He arrived at his office unusually early and called me in at once. He had spent a sleepless night, he confessed, and had decided that instead of a picture with a foreign setting, he would do an original story laid in contemporary New York. It was to deal with a triangle—a normal young man falls in love with a strange foreign girl who is obsessed by abnormal fears, and when her obsession destroys his love and he turns for consolation to a very normal girl, his office co-worker, the discarded one, beset by jealousy, attempts to destroy the young man's new love.

As Lewton's sister was later to recall, the story-line was inspired by some French fashion designs Lewton had seen. The fears which were to plague the young woman had to do with her sense of being descended from a race of Serbian women who, stemming from a tradition of animal worship in the Middle Ages, had the ability to change into vicious cats whenever their passions were aroused. There were several reasons why Lewton decided to drop the Blackwood story and invent his own. Ancient Sorceries would have required a foreign, period setting, and Tourneur argued that for an audience to experience terror it must be able to identify with characters of its own world and time. And, as if this advice were not reason enough, the fear of cats, like the uneasiness at being touched, was deeply ingrained in Lewton's complex nature and may well have compelled him to invent a story in which he could give his fear substance.

Although it is not possible to trace this phobia back to its origin in Lewton's experience, documented evidence as to its existence pre-dates the Cat People script by many years. In 1934, while crossing the United States by train for the first time to work on the Taras Bulba treatment, Lewton kept a journal of his thoughts and experiences. The following entry was headlined 'Albuquerque': 'My sleeping habits on a pullman seem to have become fixed. I have difficulty falling asleep—doze first, then drop abruptly into a deep, dreamless sleep which seems, on waking, to have lasted a moment but actually extends for eight or nine hours. I always wake at a stop and am awakened by a dream. This morning I dreamt that a house cat jumped on my shoulders and began to claw me. I woke. The person in the berth above was stirring. Evidently some atavistic instinct to guard against a beast leaping from above brought on the dream and had wakened me.'

Ruth Lewton remembers another incident which took place while her husband was working for Selznick. He did his best writing at night and often worked so late that Ruth would be forced to go to bed without him. One night she was suddenly awakened by the piercing screams of a neighbourhood cat. A moment later the door of the bedroom opened, her husband entered and stood silently at the foot of the bed. 'The cat's scream frightened him and he didn't want to have to face it alone. He had a folk fear—an atavistic kind of fear of something going way, way back. Of course, he knew better—he was a very intellectual man and not a superstitious person—and so he was both frightened and fascinated by his fear. Maybe the source of it all can be traced back to the fairy-tales told him by his Russian peasant nurse. The old nurse, like many others of her calling, used to control her charges by frightening them half to death. She was strongly aided by the Russian fairy-tale tradition which makes the Brothers Grimm seem like very tame stuff. In the Russian Little Red Riding Hood, for example, the wolf is split open down the front and dies all covered with innards and gore.'

After presenting his ideas to Bodeen, Lewton spent a week with the writer working up a two-page story-line which detailed the characters and action of Cat People more specifically. The obsessed girl was to be a Balkanborn dress designer called Irena Dubrovna who lived and worked in Manhattan. Lewton had seen and admired the French actress Simone Simon in William Dieterle's All That Money Can Buy, the movie version of Benet's The Devil and Daniel Webster. Miss Simon, a star in France in both theatre and films, had been brought to Hollywood in 1938 to make a much-publicised debut in Irving Cummings' Girls' Dormitory for 20th Century-Fox. Her career as an American film star had not been as successful as she had hoped, and after completing her part in the Dieterle film at RKO, Miss Simon returned to France. Making inquiries around the studio, Lewton discovered that Miss Simon's services might be obtained rather inexpensively; and after reading a rough draft of the screenplay, she cabled back her acceptance. With the key role cast, Lewton sent Bodeen home to work up the finer points of the story-line, instructing him not to return until he had a completed story—a long short story, as if he were writing for magazine publication rather than for the screen. After a time, Bodeen returned with the completed story, and the entire unit—Tourneur, Robson, Jessie Ponitz and Bodeen—went to work on it.

During these script sessions, a number of story-points were established which would become hallmarks of Lewton's productions. Each of the central characters was to have an occupation and was to be shown at work during the course of the movie. This was not merely an attempt to break away from the Hollywood convention of presenting characters with elaborate but unspecified means, nor yet just an attempt to add the required plausibility to a supernatural story; it was part of Lewton's respect for the characters in his films as human beings. The humans in horror movies are traditionally puppets, glorified reactors. The heroine screams, the hero tries to save her, the scientist mumbles discount metaphysics about Man daring to enter God's realm, and the Negro, pop-eyed and stuttering with fright, runs through a closed doorway, leaving behind his silhouette. In the Universaltype chillers, only the monsters were permitted recognisably human emotions—e.g., the lovely scene between the monster and the little girl in James Whale's Frankenstein.

Though planned as supernatural thrillers, and as such not primarily involved with the intricacies of human relationships, Lewton's films always managed to suggest a sense of an everyday life existing around and beyond the particulars of the story being told. Homes and apartments looked as if somebody had been living in them before the movie started; characters wore only the styles and qualities of clothing that their counterparts would in real life. (Verna De Mots, Lewton's secretary after Jessie Ponitz, recalls discussing where in Los Angeles a particular female character would buy her clothes, and then going off to that store to purchase the wardrobe.) It was, partly, this uncommon respect for the look and texture of daily life that led James Agee to write of Lewton: 'I think that few people in Hollywood show in their work that they know or care half as much about human beings as he does.' In Cat People, Irena Dubrovna was shown doing fashion sketches (Miss Simon had a knack for sketching which Lewton was quick to employ), and her husband Oliver was a draughtsman for a ship-designing firm, in whose offices several of the key sequences were staged.

From the Cat People story conferences there emerged something of a formula which would recur in Lewton's subsequent pictures. He described this to an interviewer from the Los Angeles Times: 'Our formula is simple. A love story, three scenes of suggested horror and one of actual violence. Fadeout. It's all over in less than 70 minutes.' The calm, everyday sequences were to alternate with suspense sequences of ascending terror, resulting in a climax which would bring the two moods of the story together. 'We tossed away the horror formula right from the beginning. No grisly stuff for us. No masklike faces hardly human, with gnashing teeth and hair standing on end. No creaking physical manifestations. No horror piled on horror. You can't keep up horror that's long sustained. It becomes something to laugh at. But take a sweet love story, or a story of sexual antagonisms, about people like the rest of us, not freaks, and cut in your horror here and there by suggestion, and you've got something. Anyhow, we think you have. That's the way we try to do it.'

Lewton had provided Bodeen with several of the key shock sequences—Irena's rival being stalked by some unseen beast as she crosses a Central Park traverse at night, and the sudden appearance of a huge cat while Oliver and his friend are working late on a special project. To these, Bodeen added the final suspense sequence—one of the most terrifying in screen history—in which Irena's rival for Oliver's affections is menaced by a beast while swimming at night in a darkened, deserted swimming-pool. Bodeen got the idea from Tourneur's experience of having nearly drowned while swimming alone at night. In all of these sequences the horror is implied and never explicitly shown. Lewton felt that the absence of specific menace permitted each member of the audience to project his own innermost fear, to make connections with the fears of his own life. Eschewing the studio-made monsters characteristic of the Universal movies, Lewton's films dealt with realistic horror situations based upon some universal fear or superstition—fear of the dark, the unknown, madness, death.

Lewton particularly enjoyed devising moments in his films which would cause audiences to gasp with terror. His name for these moments of sudden shock was 'busses.' The term derives from the Central Park sequence of Cat People. Jane Randolph, crossing the park late at night, hears footsteps following her. She stops under a street lamp and looks back into the darkness. The noises stop; she sees nothing. As soon as she walks beyond the circumference of lamplight, the footsteps begin again, and she hurries to the next lamp-post. At the moment when audience tension is at its height, a bus coasts into frame, simultaneously applying its pneumatic brakes in order to let off passengers. The unexpected appearance of the bus, sight and sound interrupting an already tense scene, invariably lifted theatre audiences several inches out of their seats. Lewton explained how he came up with 'busses' in an interview for Liberty magazine. 'To find ever new "busses" or horror spots, is a horror expert's most difficult problem. Horror spots must be well planned and there should be no more than four or five in a picture. Most of them are caused by the fundamental fears: sudden sound, wild animals, darkness. The horror addicts will populate the darkness with more horrors than all the horror writers in Hollywood could think of.' He amplified the point in a Los Angeles Times interview: 'I'll tell you a secret: if you make the screen dark enough, the mind's eye will read anything into it you want! We're great ones for dark patches. Remember the long walk alone at night in Cat People? Most people will swear they saw a leopard move in the hedge above her—but they didn't! Optical illusion; dark patch.'

Lewton himself used an atmosphere of darkness to test the effectiveness of a screenplay on his staff. He would begin telling the story, and as the action grew more frightening, would snap off the lights around his office and continue the story in darkness. Charles Schnee used this and other Lewton working techniques in his screenplay for Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful; in particular, in an episode in which Kirk Douglas, a film producer, comes up with darkness as the solution to a sleazy low-budget movie he's making about people turning into cats. However, the ruthless, egocentric character Douglas portrays had nothing at all to do with Lewton, as some may have supposed. Schnee had combined dozens of snippets of Hollywood gossip and lore in the creation of his enjoyably over-ripe melodrama about Hollywood insiders.

With the major problems of the screenplay ironed out and the leading actress signed, there were still a number of matters to take care of. Irena's husband and her rival were still to be cast. Lewton had noticed a young actor bicycling to the RKO lot every morning. He discovered that the actor was Kent Smith, a Broadway performer who had been under contract to RKO for nine months without having appeared in a picture. Although Smith would be expensive—his nine-month salary would be charged against the Cat People budget—Lewton felt that his air of solidity, even stolidity at times, would make the draughtsman a plausible character who would aid in suspending audience disbelief in the farther reaches of the screenplay. Another contract player, dark, attractive Jane Randolph, was selected to play Smith's co-worker who consoles him when his wife begins acting up. Tom Conway, Russian-born like Lewton and George Sanders' brother, was cast as the psychiatrist, Dr Judd. Lewton always referred to Conway, who had been starring in RKO's 'Falcon' series, as 'the nice George Sanders'. Elizabeth Russell was cast for her unforgettable bit as a cat-woman who 'recognises' Irena in a cafe, and Alan Napier, a close friend of Lewton's, was assigned a small character role.

As production time for Cat People drew closer, Lewton gathered, or was assigned, the rest of his company. The director of photography was to be Nicholas Musuraca, a specialist in shadowy, low-keyed shooting (which, in addition to heightening suspense, also served the purpose of obscuring the economic limitations of the film) who was to work on many of Lewton's other RKO pictures. The producer and his team scoured the lot for existing sets which they could use, since the allotment in the budget came to little more than $10,000—hardly enough to do more than re-dress standing sets. The Central Park setting, complete with zoo, had been used in a number of RKO films which called for Manhattan locales, notably several of the Astaire-Rogers films and a Ginger Rogers comedy. The magnificent staircase built by Orson Welles for the Amberson house was used in the brownstone where Irena had her apartment. These sets were dressed with Lewton's meticulous attention to detail and period consistency. As Bodeen points out, feline references were sprinkled throughout the sets: 'the statue of Bubastis in the museum sequence; the tiger lilies in the florist shop window; the cat's claws on the base of the bathtub when Simone tries to cleanse herself of guilt after murdering the lambs; the cats in the Goya reproduction hanging over her mantle when she tells the hero of her past.' Once, while the sets were being prepared, Tourneur did a sketch of a very small, innocent-looking kitten. Lewton loved the sketch and had it set in the middle of an outsized mat with an inscription from the Cat People screenplay: 'A cat is a frightening thing.'

At last, on 28 July 1942, shooting began on Val Lewton's first production (officially known as RKO Production 386) under Tourneur's direction. Almost immediately there was the threat of catastrophe. On the morning of the fourth day of shooting, Lew Ostrow, head of the B-unit, called Lewton into his office. Ostrow had just come from a screening of the first three days' rushes and had not liked what he had seen. He informed Lewton that he had decided to replace Tourneur with one of the studio contract directors. Lewton put in a panicky call to Koerner's office to see if he, Ostrow's superior, could prevent Tourneur's dismissal, only to be informed that Koerner was in New York and would not be returning until the next morning. Lewton somehow managed to talk Ostrow into keeping the director until Koerner could be consulted. The next day, Koerner looked at the rushes and called Ostrow to tell him that Tourneur was doing fine and was to be left alone. After that, there was little trouble. Shooting went smoothly and almost without incident, if only because the schedule was so short; so much had to be done in so little time that there was no room for temperament. Again departing from Hollywood custom, Lewton retained DeWitt Bodeen as dialogue director, feeling that whenever possible the writer should be on set when his screenplay went into production.

Only on one other occasion did the front office interfere. As Lewton conceived it, no cat was to be shown until the last few frames of the film. The presence of the beast was only to be suggested by sound and shadow, so that audiences could never be sure whether Irena's fears were imaginary or had some terrifying basis in fact. Ostrow, however, decided that a black leopard had to appear in the draughting-room sequence, and after seeing the rushes told Tourneur to reshoot the scene with a cat while the set was still standing. Technically, Tourneur complied; a drugged leopard was brought on to the set and the sequence was redone. However, Tourneur managed to shoot the scene so ambiguously (the only light in the room emanating from the top surfaces of the designing tables) that viewers could still not be sure what they were seeing. Almost all obvious traces of the leopard were obliterated by Robson in the cutting-room, so the front office was, for the first of what would be many times, outsmarted. In the swimming-pool sequence, Tourneur, again instructed that the cat's presence had to be clearly indicated, came up with another solution. The menacing shadows on the walls around the indoor pool, suggestive forms reinforced by growling noises on the soundtrack, were made by the director's fist moving in front of a diffused spotlight.

Shooting ended on Cat People on 21 August 1942. The film had been completed ahead of schedule at a total cost of $134,000. While the post-production work of editing and scoring continued, the Lewton unit scarcely had time to worry about the success of its first effort. The next project, I Walked With a Zombie, was due to begin production in less than two months, and the third, Leopard Man, two months after that. There were story conferences, casting sessions, and set and costume designs to approve. Working hard at their pre-established schedule, Lewton and his associates had little reason to suspect, even dream, that Cat People, approaching the time of its first previews, would prove to be one of the least expected, most astonishing popular successes in American film-making.

MARK ROBSON: His was a divided character. On one hand, he was an insecure man who tended to chop himself down, and yet he was a proud man too. He knew he was good and still he had a habit of pleading poverty. The stories of his pictures are not half so important as the experiments and innovative effects he tried and his ideas about shock and beauty in motion pictures. He loved beauty but disliked camera preciousness. He was a man of great likes and dislikes and a man of even greater loyalty to his people; in his eyes, they could do no wrong.

In the course of his life, he transformed himself into an Old Greenwich gentleman—that's what he really wanted to be. He tried to live up to all of the great American myths—the sailor, the athlete, the hunter. My image of him was one of a very tolerant human being who was the most human Protestant ever devised by man. His sympathy for the underdog was boundless and he very often created jobs in his films for actors and writers who had fallen upon hard times.

In a way, I think he was a man who needed an enemy. He was often unsure of himself and tended to be self-destructive. In difficult situations, he had a nervous habit of stammering. He wasted time and seldom could accomplish anything without the pressure of a deadline on his head. His nervousness and his need to push himself too hard contributed to the decline of his health.

Everyone in the Lewton unit attended the first preview of Cat People, held at the Hillstreet Theatre, a downtown Los Angeles movie house frequented by a distinctly roughneck clientele. Lewton was extremely apprehensive. Several weeks before, he and Tourneur had run the completed film for their studio bosses, and after the screening nobody would speak to them. Only Lew Ostrow stayed behind, to criticise the film for its lack of horrific content. For a man who was terrified of being without a job, this was an extremely important evening. DeWitt Bodeen recalls what happened at that first public screening:

The preview was preceded by a Disney cartoon about a little pussy-cat and Val's spirits sank lower and lower as the audience began to catcall and make loud mewing sounds. 'Oh God!' he kept murmuring, as he wiped the perspiration from his forehead. The picture's title was greeted with whoops of derision and louder meows, but when the credits were over and the film began to unreel, the audience quieted, and, as the story progressed, reacted as we had hoped an audience might. There were gasps and some screaming as the shock sequences grew. The audience accepted and believed our story, and was enchanted.

The trade paper reviews, appearing appropriately enough on Friday, 13 November 1942, were all mildly favourable; there was reason to suppose that Cat People would do all right, but no hint of the tremendous popular response it would receive. The New York newspaper reviews were not particularly encouraging when Cat People opened at the Rialto Theatre, a famous chiller showcase, on 7 December, backed up by a particularly lurid advertising campaign. Reviewers for the Times, Herald Tribune, Sunday News and World-Telegram all went thumbs down; the Sun, Sunday Mirror, Journal-American and PM were more positive, if not really enthusiastic. The Los Angeles reviews were somewhat better when the film opened on 14 January at the Hawaii Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, supported by a Warner Brothers' dud called The Gorilla Man. But a number of reviewers from various women's clubs had very definite feelings about Cat People. 'Fantastic and unhealthy,' said the University Women; 'Weird and unbelievable,' said the Business and Professional Women; 'Morbid and unconstructive,' chimed in the Parent-Teachers Association; and Zeta Phi Eta, a speech arts honorary fraternity, condemned the film as 'a horrible idea, unethically treated.' Such reviews were nearly success enough for Lewton, who delighted in them.

In spite of the mixed reviews, word-of-mouth was very good and audiences flocked to see Cat People wherever it played. The film that theatre bookers had expected would run no longer than a few days was held over week after week. It played so long at the Rialto that a number of newspaper reviewers went back for a second, more favourable look. In Hollywood, Cat People played a record thirteen-week engagement at the Hawaii, where Citizen Kane's first run lasted only twelve weeks. By the time the film's general release was completed, it had earned enough money to save RKO which, in deeper financial trouble than ever before, had been forced to pinkslip many of its employees. Although the studio has now been out of existence for nearly seventeen years, the owners of its records, RKO General Tire, will not release any of the financial files, making it impossible to quote an exact figure on how much Cat People grossed. Bodeen says $4,000,000; almost every published estimate exceeds $2,000,000.

As soon as it appeared that Cat People was going to be a sleeper, Lewton and his staff were suddenly the talk of the studio. Bodeen's old contract was replaced by a long-term pact at a higher salary. Tourneur was given an RKO director's contract with provision for his promotion to A pictures as soon as he had completed three films for Lewton, plus a bonus of $5,000. There was no salary boost for Lewton, but doors began to open to him that had been closed before. Of all the plaudits, none pleased Lewton more than a telegram from his old boss, David Selznick, which read: 'I feel that Cat People definitely and at one stroke establishes you as a producer of great competence and I know no man in recent years who has made so much out of so little as a first picture.'

After this success, the Lewtons decided that the time had finally come to put down roots in Los Angeles and buy a house. In 1943, real estate prices, particularly along the ocean where they wanted to live, were incredibly low. Many coastal home-owners quite seriously believed that they would awaken one morning to find the Japanese entrenched in their front yards. Actor Jack Holt, who had appeared in Cat People, was one of those who were frightened of a Japanese invasion and was extremely eager to sell his ranch-style house on Corsica Drive between Brentwood and Pacific Palisades. Holt had built the house himself, and it was something of a showplace with its pine-panelled living-room, suite of maids' rooms, four-car garage, and acres of surrounding land rich with fruit trees and one hundred rose bushes. The actor was so anxious to unload the house that he threw in most of the furnishings—china, crystal, linens, even blackout curtains—all for the selling price of $15,000. Lewton, whose salary at RKO was quite modest, was able to raise $5,000 as a down payment and moved in immediately. Friends who used to visit remember the house, where the producer lived until the time of his death, as a particularly warm and charming place, where the conversation was always lively and amusing.

The Lewtons never really lived a Hollywood social life; they seldom went out and almost never to the bigger parties or nightclubs. At home, they preferred small dinner parties and sailing excursions to larger gatherings, and yet the house was always filled with friends. The Tourneurs were frequent guests, and Ring Lardner, and Fred Zinnemann, and economist Josef Mischel, who would shortly become one of Lewton's writers, and Mark Robson, who sometimes brought over a friend from the RKO editing department, Robert Wise. Alan Napier, the British character actor, who appeared in Cat People and three subsequent Lewton pictures, was a special friend. He and his wife Gypsy were often invited on sailing parties on the Nina.

However, long before the Cat People success was known, Lewton and his cohorts had completed two more films and several new members had been added to the unit. Jessie Ponitz's husband, whom Lewton liked and had presented with one of the Boy Scout pocketknives he always carried, was drafted and in Officer's Training at Fort Benning, Georgia, and Jessie resigned to be with him. Her successor was Verna De Mots, a more subdued but even more devoted young woman, who served as Lewton's secretary almost until the time of his death. Verna had come from Iowa to attend U.C.L.A. until the Depression put an end to her studies. She had worked in the short subject department at RKO for nine years, and immediately before her assignment to the Lewton unit, had been assisting a contract writer at the studio. Like Jessie, Verna felt that Lewton was not really appreciated or respected by his superiors:

His film, Cat People, saved RKO when it was practically bankrupt, but they didn't show much appreciation. Charles Koerner kept on dreaming up those outrageous titles to stick him with. They didn't understand this man at all or what it was he was trying to do. But his movies cost practically nothing to make, so they let him go ahead, although they really wanted more conventional horror pictures. I remember only once did he protest one of Koerner's decisions by insisting that his Cat People had been a big success. Koerner replied, 'The only people who saw that film were Negroes and defense workers.' That's just one example of the sort of thing he was up against. One night, when Mr Lewton and I were working on the Youth Runs Wild script, he got a phone call from Sid Rogell, who replaced Lew Ostrow as head of the B-unit. Rogell had a brilliant idea which he said couldn't wait until morning. Why not, he suggested, give the judge in the story a butler? It would give the picture more class. After that call, Mr Lewton couldn't write another word. That was the kind of mentality he was forced to deal with.

Another new member of the unit was Ardel Wray, a young woman who had been involved in a Young Writers' Project at RKO and whose work had attracted Lewton's attention. Miss Wray started her association with Lewton on what is perhaps his most finished, most haunting film, I Walked With a Zombie. Even before shooting commenced on Cat People, Koerner told Lewton that his second project would be based on an article called 'I Walked With a Zombie' by columnist Inez Wallace, which had appeared in the American Weekly magazine. Mark Robson remembers that Lewton's face was white and his manner impossibly gloomy when he returned from that meeting with Koerner. He spent the rest of the day in a grumpy, irritable mood. His associates dreaded his arrival the next morning, but Lewton came in unusually early and in an inexplicably gay mood. He called his staff together and announced that in the guise of a zombie chiller, he would make a West Indian version of Jane Eyre. He would use the Brontë story-line: a young girl leaves home to work for a strange, satanic man whose wife suffers from a bizarre, incurable mental illness. Curt Siodmak, brother of the director Robert Siodmak and a novelist whose books include Donovan's Brain, was assigned to work on the screenplay with Miss Wray. Again Jacques Tourneur would direct and Mark Robson edit.

Miss Wray remembers the preparation of I Walked With a Zombie:

We were all plunged into research on Haitian voodoo, every book on the subject Val could find. He was an addictive researcher, drawing out of it the overall feel, mood and quality he wanted, as well as details for actual production. He got hold of a real calypso singer, Sir Lancelot he was called—a charming, literate, articulate man. He, in turn, found some genuine voodoo musicians. I remember they had a 'papa drum' and a 'mama drum,' that the crew on the set were fascinated by them, and by one particular scene in which a doll 'walks' in a voodoo ritual. They managed a concealed track for the doll, and it was effective. I particularly remember that doll because Val sent me out to find and buy one 'cheap.' Everything had to be cheap because we really were on a shoestring. That was another thing about Val—a low budget was a challenge to him, a spur to inventiveness, and everyone around him caught the fever. Anyway, I got a rather bland-faced doll at a department store, cheap, and by the time she had been dressed in a soft grey robe, and her hair had been combed out to the appropriate 'lost girl' look, she, too, was somehow transformed.

I don't think I can explain the particular kind of togetherness (a concept not dear to me) that Val managed then. You can't call it teamwork, because that implies a kind of hearty I'11-be-quiet-while-you-talk-and-then-you'11-be-quiet-while-I-talk situation—all wrong. It wasn't cosy. I can't speak for the others, but certainly I went home to my own life every night, though sometimes pretty late. (We'd work late, go to dinner at the Melrose Grotto, back to the studio, work some more, then walk out enjoying and talking about the eerie, half-sinister quality of an empty lot at night.) And it wasn't a meeting of the minds, in the sense that everyone agreed about everything. There were some pretty rugged disagreements. But it was togetherness, all right—really ideally, in a work sense … more like theatre. It was a small, close unit, comparable to today's independent. There wasn't too much Upstairs interference, except on the everlasting budget problem. And, if I'm not remembering falsely, some Upstairs fears that sockit-to-them was being sacrificed for 'arty stuff.'

Shooting on I Walked With a Zombie started on 26 October 1942 with a somewhat more impressive cast than for Cat People. Frances Dee, that darkly beautiful and unusually intelligent actress who never quite managed to fit into any of the standard Hollywood slots, was to play Betsy, the young Canadian nurse who leaves her home to attend the sick wife of a plantation owner on San Sebastian in the West Indies. Tom Conway was the Rochester-like Holland. James Ellison, filling out his last obligation as an RKO contract player, was top-billed as Conway's brother, and Edith Barrett was cast as the mother. Sir Lancelot made a strong impression, singing a calypso ballad of his own devising which was woven into the story, and Christine Gordon, as Holland's afflicted wife, was especially effective in her non-speaking role. (The wife was called Jessica, Lewton's farewell tribute to the departing Mrs Ponitz.) Darby Jones made an equally silent and iconographically effective contribution as a zombie. The art direction by Albert D'Agostino and Walter Keller magically evoked the West Indies, and Roy Hunt's photography was superb. Shooting ended on 19 November and the trade reviews, appearing in early March, were enthusiastic.

In late April, when I Walked With a Zombie had its first public screenings, the newspaper reviewers were unanimous in their praise. Perhaps Lewton's masterpiece, it is one of those exceedingly rare movies which manage to summarise everything that is artistically valid about a Hollywood genre and then go on to transcend the genre itself. Walked With a Zombie does for horror movies what Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country does for the Western, and the Gene Kelly-Stanley Donen Singin' in the Rain for the musical. Tourneur prefers it above all the films he has made, and Ruth Lewton considers it her favourite among her husband's productions.

However, there was still the problem of the title. As Mrs Lewton says: 'I would never go to see a movie called I Walked With a Zombie unless somebody dragged me there.' It is perhaps characteristic of Lewton's career that this film, one of the rare pieces of pure visual poetry ever to come out of Hollywood, was seen by hardly anybody but the bloodthirsty chiller fans who frequented theatres like the Rialto in New York. Later, through the efforts of critics like James Agee and Manny Farber, readers of magazines like The Nation and The New Republic were alerted to the very special quality of Lewton's productions.

Lewton's third assignment was a shade more prestigious—a novel by suspense writer Cornell Woolrich called Black Alibi. Koerner, never one to overlook a past success, retitled the property The Leopard Man. Ardel Wray was given sole responsibility for the screenplay this time, and Lewton asked her to take on some of the pre-production work as well. 'Leopard Man had a New Mexico background. There was no hope of location shooting or even a second unit for backgrounds, so Val handed over to me his very good camera and sent me to Santa Fe to take pictures of whatever exteriors I thought might be useful to use, set-wise. This, although he knew that I had never taken any pictures more elaborate than Brownie camera snapshots and had no other qualifications either for the job. I don't know why he trusted me with this—faith and desperation, I guess. I was in mortal terror of the camera. First day there I took pictures frantically, of anything and everything, and took them to a shop for development, then waited a couple of days, as I recall, to see if I had gotten anything at all, let alone something useful. Miraculously, probably because it was a nearly foolproof camera, it was all right. From the pictures I took there, we worked out the sets. Another instance of Val's genius for improvisation.'

Shooting on The Leopard Man began on 9 February 1943. Once again Tourneur directed and Robson edited. As with the I Walked With a Zombie casting, the male lead, Dennis O'Keefe, was fulfilling the last part of an RKO contract; the leading lady, Margo, was an intelligent, brunette actress who had never quite managed to find her niche in Hollywood pictures. The supporting cast included Jean Brooks and Isabel Jewell, whom Lewton was to use again.

The Leopard Man was a departure from the Lewton formula in several important respects. It was not a supernatural story: though the Woolrich novel has its unearthly overtones, these turn out to be red herrings—inventions of a deranged killer designed to mask his activities. It was Lewton's first try at a straightforward murder story, and for the first time he included several sequences of explicit bloodshed. In an episode which haunts the memory, a little Mexican girl returning from the store where her mother has sent her to buy food is clawed to death while trying to get someone to open the door. Although the violence is mainly suggested—after the child's shuddery walk home, the attack itself is shot from inside the house so that we can only hear what is happening—the fact of the child's death is revealed by a rivulet of blood trickling under the door. As several of the more perceptive New York reviewers observed, the sequence is so strong that it turns out to be too much for the better interests of the film, leaving the remainder of the story as anti-climax. There were two other fairly explicit homicides as well, again a departure from the Lewton formula of suggest, don't show. Not too long after the film's release, Lewton admitted to an interviewer from Coronet magazine that The Leopard Man had been a miscalculation. 'We knew we were right from the start. It took only one more picture to convince us of that. Now we're right back in the groove.' Like the other two films, The Leopard Man had a shooting schedule of less than a month, cost no more than $150,000 to produce, and proved an extremely lucrative venture for RKO.

The Leopard Man was completed in early March; the next film, The Seventh Victim, was not scheduled to go into production until May. Lewton's experiment had been successful. In spite of the poverty row budgets and the awful titles, he had managed to make the kind of film he believed in and had proved that the public would recognise and respond to quality in low-budget movies. The next group of films would involve new talent and fresher, more ambitious themes. In less than a year, Lewton had scored the kind of success that becomes an instant part of Hollywood mythology. He entered his second year as a producer with everything in his favour, a position he would never quite manage to achieve again.

JACQUES TOURNEUR: We complemented one another, never argued. We sailed together often but nothing extraordinary ever happened; we just relaxed and made a point of never discussing films. Usually he was easygoing and between pictures tended to put on weight. He never got drunk or arrested or ran around or did anything crazy. We worked so well together. At the time it appeared beneficial for both of us to split up but now I realise that it was a mistake.

RKO broke up the Lewton-Tourneur partnership after the completion of The Leopard Man, on the dubious premise that since the producer and director had worked so well together, they would work twice as well separated. As promised, Tourneur was promoted to A pictures, the first being Days of Glory, a war story set in Russia which featured Gregory Peck in his first film role. Today, regretting the separation, Tourneur says: 'We had a perfect collaboration—Val was the dreamer, the idealist, and I was the materialist, the realist. We should have gone right on doing bigger, more ambitious pictures, and not just horror movies.'

In fact, Lewton had been planning his escape from the restrictive horror genre for some time. The titles he was assigned prevented his films from being taken seriously. As he once wrote to his sister, 'You shouldn't get mad at the New York reviewers. Actually, it's very difficult for a reviewer to give something called I Walked With a Zombie a good review.' Lewton often managed to get past the opposition of his superiors by writing dummy screenplays which would secure him the necessary actors and properties without really letting the front office know what the film would be about. He attempted a trick of this kind, unsuccessfully, as his breakaway from horror movies:

One trick under my belt is that I'm going to sneak over a comedy on them. They've given me a silly title, The Amorous Ghost, and I plan to make a comedy of it, a comedy in which Casanova, because he never made any woman unhappy, is allowed to return to earth for a twelve-hour visit. In this time he goes to a masquerade, meets a lovely but very forthright modern girl and is so desirous of her that much to his and her amazement when he is snatched back to the other world, he finds that he has brought her with him. His world is an eighteenth-century conception of heaven, a little Fragonard masterpiece, as charming and as unreal as it can be. From then on, the story takes several directions; the comedy theme, which is a sort of Yankee in King Arthur's Court affair, with a young modern girl shooing away the eighteenth-century wolves, and the dramatic story, which is concerned with the modus operandi of the girl's return to this world, a sort of Orpheus and Eurydice theme. I know this sounds mad, but I've been rehashing the plot so much today with the writer, a German refugee and formerly director of the Dresden State Theatre, Leo Mittler, that I'm weary of it. I've given you enough of the plot to give you the central idea. Tom Conway, who played Holland in Zombie, will play Casanova, and I'm looking for a girl. (In a letter to his mother and sister, 11 May 1943.)

With Tourneur gone, Lewton was forced to find a director for the next picture on his schedule, a suspense original called The Seventh Victim to be scripted by DeWitt Bodeen. He chose Mark Robson, who had been working with him since he arrived at RKO and had been plumping for advancement from the cutting-room to directing. Robson had obtained his first studio job while still an undergraduate at U.C.L.A.; he continued in films while studying law in the evenings, working himself up through the system from set director to assistant cutter to cutter. He and Lewton had something more than a working friendship; Robson was a constant guest at the Lewton home, and at one time, as Nina Druckman recalls, was so under her father's spell that he talked and gestured exactly like him. Lewton treated Robson with the tenderness reserved for a son and felt pleased to be able to help him advance his career. As he observed in a note to his mother, 'I gave the direction of Seventh Victim to the young cutter who did the editorial work on the other pictures, Mark Robson, and he's doing a beautiful job—almost as well as Jacques. This makes me very happy as I'm extremely fond of him.'

Bodeen's The Seventh Victim, again written in short story rather than screenplay form, dealt with an orphaned girl in Los Angeles who is marked as the seventh victim of a murderer and must discover his identity to save herself. While Bodeen was in New York enjoying a studio-paid bonus vacation and researching Washington Irving and Tarrytown legends for a future film, Lewton decided to scrap the Bodeen story and replace it with one of his own devising. The new Seventh Victim was to be about devil worship in Manhattan. Charles O'Neal was brought in to work up the Lewton story-line about an orphaned schoolgirl who goes to New York in search of her older sister, only to discover that the sister is a member and intended victim of a cult of Greenwich Village devil-worshippers. While O'Neal was working, Lewton was called to attend a meeting of studio executives. At this gathering, he was praised for the success of his first three productions and told that a promotion would be forthcoming. After his current slate of productions was completed, Lewton was to be advanced to A-producer status. He was naturally delighted by the news and immediately set about planning for his first big-budget film. Several weeks later, Lewton announced some of the properties he was considering and stated that Mark Robson would be the director of his first A feature.

The studio bosses were outraged at the idea of entrusting a major production to an untried director and presented Lewton with an ultimatum—either no Robson or no Aproducership. Ever loyal to his co-workers, Lewton thereupon refused the promotion and went ahead with his plans to turn The Seventh Victim over to Robson. He realised that his only chance for artistic control over his productions depended upon his remaining with the B-unit where the films were so inexpensive that the front office seldom felt the need to meddle. Later in his career, Lewton was to know the frustration of trying to work without sufficient decision-making authority.

As successor to Tourneur, Robson recognised that he had his work cut out for him. 'I Walked With a Zombie was the best of Val's films, an absolutely beautiful movie. Jacques is a rare talent with a magnificent eye. It was his misfortune to come up in the period when the virtuosity of the actor had come to predominate and the public started to lose interest in the visual elements of films. His is an extraordinary talent and Zombie is one of the most exquisite films ever made. Jacques was promoted to Days of Glory and all at once he was a big-time director. Val could no longer afford him and, since I had been in on all of the conferences from the very beginning, he turned to me.'

The Seventh Victim introduced another newcomer: a twenty-year-old actress named Janet Cole, who had been discovered by Selznick agent Leon Lance at the Pasadena Playhouse, was selected to play the orphaned heroine. Miss Cole, who changed her name to Kim Hunter just before shooting began, was supported in the film by a number of Lewton veterans chosen from what was rapidly becoming a private stock company. Tom Conway was starred again, along with Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell and Ben Bard, from the Leopard Man cast. Elizabeth Russell, the elegantly feline menace from Cat People, turned in a memorable cameo as a consumptive beauty preparing to go out on the town for a final fling. Chef Milani, of bottled salad-dressings fame, played an Italian chef. Once again Nicholas Musuracawas director of photography and Roy Webb supplied the musical score.

The Seventh Victim rivals I Walked With a Zombie as Lewton's masterpiece. The bizarre tale is told with tiny, impressionistic strokes which combine to form a haunting vision of isolation and despair, a superb illustration of the Donne epigraph, 'I run to Death, and Death meets me as fast, and all my Pleasures are like Yesterdays.' A comparison with Roman Polanski's recent and over-praised Rosemary's Baby, a movie which treats the same subject, sets the many excellences of Lewton's film into bold relief. The producer had provided his fledgling director with an extensively annotated screenplay, filled with carefully detailed atmospheric touches recalled from his own bachelor days on Perry Street. (The sequence in which two men prop up a dead man in a subway car, attempting to pass him off as a drunk, stems from a similar incident which Lewton once observed in Greenwich Village.)

Perhaps because it was the first Lewton film with a reasonably intelligent title, The Seventh Victim did not do quite so well at the box-office as his previous pictures. RKO hardly helped matters with its suggestions as to how this poetic little film might best be promoted. Example: 'On a small table in your lobby, display a statue, a bust and head of a woman. Wherever the skin shows on the statue, mould small spots out of chewing gum or candle grease to resemble goose pimples. Place a card nearby reading "Even this marble developed goose pimples after seeing The Seventh Victim".'

Lewton promptly assigned Robson a second film, The Ghost Ship, which was scheduled for production in early August 1943. This new film was predicated upon an unusual set of circumstances and demands. RKO had built a huge ship set for a film directed by Lew Landers, and, hoping to squeeze a bit more out of its investment, instructed Lewton to come up with a story which would utilise the impressively detailed set. At the same time, he was ordered to make sure the leading role would be suitable for Richard Dix, who had one remaining contractual obligation to the studio. Lewton worked up the story and assigned it to his old mentor and friend Donald Henderson Clarke, who had moved to Hollywood and was trying to establish himself as a screenwriter. The Ghost Ship co-starred Russell Wade and Edith Barrett, with such Lewton alumni as Ben Bard and Sir Lancelot in supporting roles.

It opened to indifferent reviews, and had just managed to play out the first engagements when serious legal problems developed. Some months before, two men had dropped off an unsolicited story and play at Lewton's office, and Verna De Mots, following usual studio procedure, returned the manuscripts to the writers. Shortly after the Ghost Ship première, the men brought a law suit claiming that Lewton had appropriated crucial elements of their work. Although Lewton's story had nothing in common with the submitted material (except for those essentials which all stories in that genre share), the claimants were able to prove that Lewton could have had access to their work. Lewton described the case in a letter to his mother and sister, dated 26 August 1945:

A plagiarism case on The Ghost Ship is to be tried tomorrow and although the plaintiffs are obviously wrong and have no merit in their case, it is the kind of racketeering which is very hard to guard against and we all have to be very much on our toes in the court room or the case may go against us despite the most obvious sort of innocence. The studio wanted to settle out of court, as the plaintiffs are suing for fifty thousand dollars but were willing to settle for seven hundred. I refused, as I have a deep-seated moral feeling that such persons should not be allowed to get away with their little practices, even if it is much more convenient to let them get away with it. It will cost the studio and myself three or four times as much to defend as to settle, but I feel it is a small price to pay for a really clear name.

Ironically, Lewton did not clear his name in the suit. He and RKO lost the court case and were forced to pay damages of $25,000 plus court costs. Lewton was shocked at being convicted of an act which he did not commit. As part of the judgment, The Ghost Ship was withdrawn from theatrical exhibition, and has since been seen only in infrequent and presumably illegal television airings.

Shooting on The Ghost Ship had ended on 28 August 1943. Two days earlier, shooting commenced on one of the producer's greatest popular and critical successes, The Curse of the Cat People. Once again Charles Koerner had come up with a tawdry title designed to cash in on the Cat People success, and once again Lewton was powerless to do anything about it. But that fact did not prevent him from using the title as a cover for his attempt to make a film quite beyond the scope of the thrillers he had previously produced. After weeks of fighting and resisting the idea of a Cat People sequel, Lewton finally sat down and wrote his own story, a fascinating study in child psychology, about a lonely little girl who invents an imaginary friend to supply her with the love and understanding that her parents are too limited and unperceptive to provide. De Witt Bodeen developed Lewton's idea, adding elements from his Tarrytown research, and Lewton reassembled the key members of his Cat People cast to convince the studio that they were going to get another supernatural chiller. Simone Simon would reappear as Irena, the imaginary playmate, dead long before the story begins, whose photograph serves as the child's inspiration for what her invented friend looks like. Kent Smith was again Oliver Reed, Irena's former husband, now remarried to his sympathetic co-worker, Jane Randolph, and moved to Tarrytown suburbia. Of course, the relationship of these characters to their previous incarnations was rather tenuous at times, but the repeat casting and his acceptance of the title were sufficient to free Lewton to make this unusually sensitive and delicate film.

The subject material of The Curse of the Cat People provides some important insights into Lewton's curious, paradoxical nature. Much of his desire to make the film, and his skill at handling such an unusual and uncommercial theme, stems from his own insecure, repressive and highly romantic childhood at Who-Torok, geographically close to the film's Tarrytown setting. Ruth Lewton has described her husband as a man who, as a youngster, was forced to retreat from reality into an insubstantial world of his own creation and who never quite made it all the way back to reality. At least two sequences in the film are based upon events from his own life. Early in the film, nobody attends the child's birthday party because she has placed the invitations in the cleft of a tree, which her father had once told her was a magic mailbox. Lewton himself had once been instructed to mail invitations to his sister Lucy's birthday party and had made the same mistake, unable to separate fact from fantasy. Later, in the sequence where Irena teaches the child arithmetic, she uses the courtly, enchanting number-stories that Lewton had invented to educate his own children. One was a tall princess; two, a prince who kneels before her on one knee, and so forth. Most significant of all, this tale of a troubled child, so incisive that it has been frequently screened for students of child psychology, was created by a man who was almost totally incapable of recognising and handling the needs of his own sensitive, insecure little daughter.

Other Lewton regulars, including Elizabeth Russell and Sir Lancelot, were cast, along with Julia Dean, who was especially charming as a senile actress. Six-year-old Ann Carter turned in an astonishingly precise and decidedly unmoppety performance as the child, Amy. Nicholas Musuraca was director of photography, and Robert Wise was signed on to cut the film. Because Robson's schedule on The Ghost Ship overlapped with the start of The Curse of the Cat People, Lewton had chosen a second new director, a young man with documentary film training named Gunther Von Fritsch.

Fritsch was taken off the picture about halfway through. RKO officially announced that he had been drafted, but Robert Wise recalls that those were not the actual circumstances of Fritsch's departure:

Gunther wasn't drafted. The Curse of the Cat People was to be his first feature and I was his editor. A shooting schedule was set up for eighteen days but he fell so far behind that after the eighteen days were used up, he was still only halfway through the screenplay. Val tried and tried to get Gunther to pick up the tempo, but it was his first big job and he was just too nervous to move any faster. One Saturday morning, I got a call from Sid Rogell, who was then head of the B-unit. I had done some second unit work for Rogell and had been after him to let me direct. Rogell told me that I was to replace Gunther on Monday morning. Gunther and I had planned to do some extra night footage that very evening and I knew he had not yet been told of his dismissal. I couldn't bring myself to go to work with him under those conditions and I called Val to ask his advice. 'Look,' he said, 'if it's not you, it will be somebody else. You're not pushing Gunther out.' So I took over the picture on Monday morning and brought it in by early October. When I arrived on the set that first day, Val gave me a copy of Shaw's The Art of Rehearsal which I've kept with me ever since.

The Curse of the Cat People lacked all of the blood and guts that the studio had expected. Some retakes were ordered, like the insertion of a shot of two boys chasing a black cat up a tree, and a number of small but artistically crucial details were cut. The most damaging of these excisions was a shot of Amy looking at a picture book illustration of a Sleeping Beauty princess dressed in a medieval gown. When the imaginary friend appears, she is dressed in this same garment, so the omission of the preparatory sequence makes her garb seem inexplicable, even laughable. (Manny Farber commented upon the 'burleycue discordancy' of this 'amazing garment', and James Agee described Miss Simon's first appearance as 'in a dress and a lascivious lighting which make her facade look like a relief map from What Every Young Husband Should Know.')

Still, in spite of the meddling, The Curse of the Cat People managed to emerge from RKO without too much disfiguration and it proved to be one of Lewton's most highly acclaimed films. Agee named it, along with Lewton's subsequent Youth Runs Wild, the best fiction film of 1944, Joseph Foster in The New Masses found it a charming picture and remarked that he could not 'for the life of me understand why RKO should have presented the film under such discouraging auspices'—i.e. the misleading title and showcasing in horror theatres like New York's Rialto. (Lewton had tried to persuade the studio to change the title to Amy and Her Friend, but to no avail.) John McManus of PM also deplored the awful titling of what he considered 'one of the nicest movies ever made.'

The Curse of the Cat People was the film which finally convinced even the most sceptical critics and moviegoers that Lewton was a film-maker to take seriously, even to treasure. It was his first production with 'serious' subject matter, and on the basis of its theme alone it merited a great deal of attention and applause. Probably no Hollywood film-maker ever managed to achieve anything quite so fine while working at so low a level on the economic scale. Still, The Curse of the Cat People is not aesthetically one of Lewton's very best productions; it is probably more worth doing than any of the others, but it is not done half so well as IWalked With a Zombie or The Seventh Victim. Manny Farber, writing in The New Republic, provided a fair appraisal of the film's weaknesses and its special virtues: 'The Curse of the Cat People lacks sufficient life in the significance of its insights into reality, and the playing, which is 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.'

As usual RKO decked out the film with moronic promotional taglines like 'The Black Menace Creeps Again!' and 'Sensational Return of the Killer-Cat Woman.' One wonders whether anyone in the studio's publicity department had ever bothered to take a look at what they were promoting. Once again there were the bizarre suggestions for exhibitors. 'Stencil paw prints leading to your theatre.' 'Send out a small group of men and women wearing cat masks to walk through the streets with cards on their backs reading "Are cats people?" Schedule their routes so that they appear before the gates of defense factories when the various shifts are changing.'

But once again, Lewton's film was recognised through all of the chiller trappings as a work of sensitivity and grace, and this time not only by film critics. On 7 September 1944 the film was used by the Hollywood Writers Mobilization and the Los Angeles Council of Social Agencies as the highlight of a seminar devoted to the treatment of children in films. Lewton and Wise appeared and were praised not only for the soundness of the film's psychological content but also for the 'intelligent and unselfconscious' handling of the Negro servant. Such use of Negro characters was a distinguishing feature of Lewton's productions, from the black waitress in the Cat People cafe to the Negro man Friday in his last film, Apache Drums. His films are free of both the racial caricature typical of Hollywood in the Thirties and Forties, and the patronising special pleading of more recent pictures like The Defiant Ones and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?. Lewton was simply a film-maker who, above all else, respected the human dimensions of the materials he handled, and so it is hardly surprising that his are among the very few American films which treat the black man with individuality and dignity. Shortly after the Los Angeles seminar, Lewton was again invited to appear with his film, this time by Dr Fearing, head of the Child Psychology Clinic at U.C.L.A., who wanted his students to see the picture and discuss with Lewton some of the problems it raised. At one point, Dr Fearing praised Lewton's use of Amy's tight-lipped half-smile, observing that in his treatment of children with similar emotional problems, the same reticent smile appeared again and again. But Lewton, more the yarnspinner and B movie miracle worker, refused to take credit for this particular touch. Little Ann Carter, he explained, had lost one of her front teeth during shooting, and since there was not enough time or money to have the tooth replaced, she was instructed to act with her mouth shut for the rest of the filming.

JAMES AGEE: The best fiction films of the year, The Curse of the Cat People and Youth Runs Wild, were made by Val Lewton and his associates. I esteem them so highly because for all of their unevenness their achievements are so consistently alive, limber, poetic, humane, so eager toward the possibilities of the screen, and so resolutely against the grain of all we have learned to expect from the big studios. But I am afraid there is no reason to believe that the makers of these films, under the best of circumstances, would be equipped to make the great, and probably very vulgar, and certainly very forceful revolutionary pictures that are so desperately needed. Indeed, I suspect that their rather gentle, pleasing, resourceful kind of talent is about the strongest sort we can hope to see working in Hollywood with any consistent, useful purity of purpose; and the pictures themselves indicate to what extent that is frustrated. (In The Nation, 20 January 1945.)