Cat Girl (1957) on Netflix
Leonora Johnson learns from uncle Edmund Brandt of a family curse: a leopard's spirit will possess her. Her former boyfriend, Dr. Brian Marlowe, a psychiatrist, thinks it is in her mind.
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- Netflix2.7/5
- IMDb5.4/10776 votes
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Trailer
Plot summary
Leonora Johnson travels to the ancestral house she is to inherit, and her uncle Edmund Brandt tells her what comes with it: a curse that has run through the family for centuries and the spirit of a leopard that will take her over. She was told to come alone, but her husband Richard insists on joining her, and their friends Allan and Cathy come with them to the house. Brian Marlowe, a psychiatrist staying in the area and once close to Leonora, hears her account of the curse and puts it down to a delusion; he proposes that she enter a medical facility, and she consents.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Cat Girl (1957)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- When American International Pictures executives saw the finished film they were furious; Samuel Z. Arkoff demanded "Where is the Cat Monster?", so effects artist Paul Blaisdell was hired to build a furry cat mask and claws in less than three days and splice them into the finale for the U.S. release.
- Director Alfred Shaughnessy called Lou Rusoff's script "ludicrous" and wanted to rewrite it as a psychological thriller in which Leonora Johnson only believes she is turning into a monster; Rusoff, he said, could not care less, being paid and keen on his first-day-of-shooting money and a trip to London.
- Cat Girl was the first Anglo-U.S. co-production for American International Pictures, made with Britain's Anglo-Amalgamated; AIP put up $25,000 of the budget and a script by its regular writer Lou Rusoff in exchange for Western Hemisphere rights.
- Paul Blaisdell took his cat mask and claws home to Topanga Canyon and used them in home movies with his friend Bob Burns; the mask was later among the props destroyed in the fiery climax of AIP's 1958 film How to Make a Monster.
