Another purchase from the Network sale: it's been good to finally be able to see it again too, especially given that my old VHS copy "mysteriously disappeared" sometime around 2006 after I broke up with the thoroughly unpleasant woman I was then dating. Strange coincidence, that. Actually come to think of it, it might have even been a while before that, when some thoroughly untrustworthy "friends of friends" visited my house: my indulgences were varied and many back then, so many memories of that time have started to meld into one. Either way, it's taken me a whole thirteen years to replace (something of a record, especially in this age of freely available digital downloads) and having finally done so, I have to say it's a lot slower and clunkier than I remember it being: not that that's necessarily a bad thing in itself, it just doesn't hang together as well as I remember it doing on my sole previous viewing. OK, admittedly, I probably lost the atmos somewhat this time by editing articles whilst watching it - but the fact of the matter is, I wouldn't have felt the need to do that in the first place had it grabbed my attention squarely by the nadge.
Still, it has its moments. Starting off in fine mock-Gothic fashion (though in a clearly present-day 1957 setting) we soon run into such interesting characters as the unfaithful husband, the strangely accented ex-boyfriend and the 'wanton trollop': there's also some humorous product placement ("I'm taking my Courage in both hands" quoth one character holding a bottle of beer) a suitably disturbing "madwoman in straitjacket" brouhaha sequence in the middle and a subtly restrained lack of bloodletting, and the final scene, though like much of the film a complete steal from Jacques Tourneur's CAT PEOPLE (1942) is very effective. Especially with the luscious Barbara Shelley, sultry redhead par excellence, looking super-smoulderingly-schlurpable in her black PVC jacket.
In fact to be fair, all eyes are on Babs pretty much throughout the entire proceedings - she is THE star, after all, with most of the other characters merely nominal, and as such, it's more or less all about her, her family curse (never fully explained, but that's the law of BISSITS for you) and her giant leopard. Suspend all disbelief hereafter. That said, the entire cast does a fair job, even with their limited tools - and it is quite chucklesome to see a black-haired Jack "Nelson Gabriel off The Archers" May playing a young handsome philanderer a mere TWELVE YEARS before his stint as the grey-haired, Draconian perve-judge in Lindsay Shonteff's NIGHT AFTER NIGHT AFTER NIGHT. Then again, people aged so quickly back then: in those days, if you saw two old blokes in their mid-70s on TV, they were likely to be a pair of grizzled, clay pipe-smoking Great War veterans sat in a Derby & Joan club, whereas nowadays, they're the greatest rock band in the world having just released their new album (which, coincidentally, has also taken thirteen bloody years to do) Besides, I guess nobody at the time the film was made expected people to still be able to remember it twelve years on- any more than people in 1969 expected their peers to recount twelve years back.
In which case, having taken that last point into account, does CAT GIRL still stand up to scrutiny 62 years on? Yes, but it's in no way a classic, any more than Shelley's other, made-by-Hammer-under-an-assumed-name feline flick SHADOW OF THE CAT (1961) Like many of its era, it will forever remain eclipsed by its weightier contemporaries, and deservedly so: nonetheless, it's worth part of an afternoon or evening of your time, and part of that Brit Horror tapestry we all find so fascinating.