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Emily Bergl made her feature debut in The Rage. She has worked steadily and extensively over the last ten years, mostly in TV and is perhaps now best known from appearing in the miniseries Taken or for her role as Annie on the comedy-drama Men in Trees. I have only caught her once or twice in other films so I can't speak for how she has or hasn't grown/altered as an actress, but if you see The Rage for only one reason, watch it for her. As Rachel, Bergl gives a peerless performance. There is confidence mixed with shyness, sexiness mixed with goofiness, and gentleness mixed with, well, rage. She comes across as more of an ordinary (re: complex) teenage girl than most Hollywood movies ever make allowances for. Her chemistry with Jason London (as Jesse) is sublime and isn't about the hot and heavy bump n' grind - tough there is that - but more about that idealistic first love where you have found someone with whom you connect and feel free to be yourself. We feel that loss at the end, and just because it comes in a violent horror movie, doesn't make it any less moving.

The Curse of the Cat People stands in my mind as the only case where the producer of the film wanted to change the title because he thought it was deceptive and misleading to audiences. Take a bow, Val Lewton! Lewton's name is still synonymous 60 years later with high-quality B movies made on infinitesimal budgets. With only 14 productions over ten years (before his untimely death in 1951), Lewton collaborated with talented writers, directors and design teams to create dread and suspense when the money and time for special effects did not exist. In spite of or due to these restraints, titles like Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, The Body Snatcher and Isle of the Dead still have an aura of spookiness around them and aren't so easily dismissed as quaint relics of an earlier horror era. Cat People, from 1942, was his first production and features a classic scene of a woman in an indoor swimming pool being stalked by the title creature. Using only shadows and sound and a slashed robe, director Jacques Tourneur conjures up mood and menace. The story, of a woman frightened of her passion because she believes it can cause her to transform into a panther, is grounded in psychological realism - although the profession takes it on the chin as her psychiatrist/would-be savior becomes the only victim - and quietly effective performances.

The film was a hit and understandably RKO Studios wanted a follow-up. With Lewton producing, the screenwriter (DeWitt Bodeen) returning and actors Simone Simon, Kent Smith and Jane Randolph appearing as their same characters, one might imagine a prototypical sequel. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are no cat people and only one cat (added in at the studio's request during reshoots) in 1944's The Curse of The Cat People. Instead, there is a gentle and perceptive, though quite odd, drama about childhood fantasy and loneliness. Gone is the shadowy city of Cat People, replaced by an archetypal 1940s suburbia, with the obligatory Gothic and imposing "house where a strange lady lives" just down the street. The sequel is even more steeped in psychology than the first as parents Oliver and Alice Reed attempt to understand their imaginative, withdrawn daughter Amy and become concerned when her new imaginary friend appears to be the ghost of Oliver's first wife, Irina.

Many of the particular details of the film are taken from Lewton's childhood, even the setting of Tarrytown, NY where Washington Irving wrote about The Headless Horseman. Clocking in at only 70 minutes, there is an almost indescribably queer (as in unusual) quality to the film. Troubled as the production may have been (the first director was replaced by editor Robert Wise, who launched his career behind the camera here), there are no hints of that in the finished product. What is most unsettling is its earnestness and all of its unanswered questions. There is a fable-like air about the film, much talk about how important a girl's sixth birthday is, and even the implication that a part of a child dies or becomes altered as it reaches that age. There are also indirect indications (notably through direct denials) that Amy is really Irina's child. Oliver and Alice seem to have a peculiarly loveless marriage, or perhaps they are still haunted by the events of the first film and can't quite bring themselves to break that "curse." Even the climax of The Curse of the Cat People mingles relief with the melancholic suggestion that something has been lost or broken that cannot be fixed. The studio did their best to let people expect that the "black menace would creep again" but I would love to have seen the faces of an opening night crowd for this film, and then gauged their reactions over some coffee and pie afterwards. Seemingly simple, the film is fairly inscrutable and mystifying and yes, entertaining.

Next time: It made over $400 million domestic at the box office this summer. What is there left to say about it? I will do my darndest to find something.

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