Cat Girl.

In the late 1950's and 1960's London born Barbara Kowin, better known to the film going public as Barbara Shelley, became Hammer Horror's number one female star and there after the leading lady of British Horror. Appearing in such films as Blood of the Vampire (1958), The Gorgon (1964), Dracula Prince of Darkness (1966), Rasputin, the Mad Monk (1966) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967). But before this successful run of horror classics she starred in the remake of the 1942 Jacques Tourneur directed and Val Lewton produced film of the same name Cat People.

 

The wonderful Barbara Shelley (left).

This 1957 update of the supernatural chiller stars Shelley as Leonora Johnson who is instructed to return to her ancestral home by her Uncle (Ernest Milton) where she is informed that she is the heir to the family curse which involves being possessed by the spirit of a leopard! Neither her husband, her friends or her ex lover psychiatrist Dr Brian Marlowe (Robert Ayres) believe in the curse and put her ever increasingly strange behaviour down to her mental state brought on by her husbands unfaithfulness. Dr Marlowe then commits her to a sanatorium, will this incarceration cure her suspected insanity or is there a lot more to the family curse?

 

A cat fight?

Although this low budget B-movie is far from a classic it has as its saving grace a leading lady whose convincing performance is well above the work produced by her co-stars. The Daily Cinema called her performance ‘blood curdling’, with Kinematograph Weekly describing it as ‘A hectic amalgam of savagery and sex’

Best known for being script editor of the 1971 TV drama Upstairs, Downstairs, which was must see viewing in the early part of the 1970's, and the pop revue 6.5 Special (1958) Alfred Shaughnessy directed this grand example of British gothic cinema with ingredients of ‘erotic sex and violent horror combined’[1] – well for 1957 anyway.  

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[1] The British ‘B’ Movie. Steve Chibnall, Brian McFarlane.

Suspended Alibi.

A man comes down a staircase of a large double fronted house, gun in hand, he quietly opens the door ahead of him and is immediately shoot by a young boy in a full Red Indian headdress. There’s a rather good-looking women (Honor Blackman) sitting on the settee doing her mending, the man is the women’s husband, he has a well-paid job as features editor on a large daily newspaper. After wrestling the Red Indian to the well-carpeted floor his son carries on playing on his own whilst dad sits to read the paper.  Domestic bliss: that is until a chain of events that begins when a telephone rings and could quite easily end with a hangman’s noose!

 

That fatal telephone call!

This middle class crime drama which involves an infidelity between our ‘not quite as content as he seems’ feature editor Paul Pearson (Patrick Holt a actor who was known as the Dennis Price of the B-movie) and the attractive ‘other women’ Diana (Naomi Chance) and dare we forget the real reason for our story the rather unpleasant murder of Pearson’s card school friend Bill Forrest (Bryan Coleman) who always gives Pearson an alibi whilst he carries out his indiscretions.  A series of coincidences leads to a further death and the wrong man standing tall above the trap door on a prison scaffold.  

 

Questioned by the police as the circumstantial evidence piles up.

Directed by London born Alfred Shaughnessy who was best known for being a script editor on the popular TV series Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-1975) of which he wrote 68 episodes himself. He also wrote for Norman Wisdom and along with other feature films he directed Cat Girl (1957) a horror film with ‘sexy qualities’ and took one of the TV's popular music programmes and made it into a feature film namely the ground breaking 6.5 Special (1968). Even with a minimal budget Shaughnessy succeeds in turning, what on the surface could be a normal run off the mill middleclass whodunit, into a tight and competent thriller that benefits from the familiar face of Blackman who is convincing as the wronged wife who will not believe that her husband is a philandering murderer?  Both the original story and the screenplay are by Kenneth Hayes. One reviewer opined 'Here's one of these brisk, efficiently made pieces of quota entertainment which fill their modest place in the programme so worthily. Modestly produced, it nonetheless provides an hour of honest enjoyment'[1] and theirs nothing wrong with a wee bit of honest enjoyment, unlike Paul Pearson who enjoyed a little too much dishonest enjoyment!

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[1] To-Days Cinema 1956.