October 15
#12 The Leopard Man (1943)

The greatest thing about 1944’s The Curse of the Cat People was that, unlike 99% of all sequels, it was not a retread of the original.  Instead it actually moved the characters into a completely different genre–a children’s fantasy–in such a way that it offered a sort of flip-side or negative-image of the original film, complementing it without remaking it.  (It was also the directorial debut of Orson Welles’ editor, Robert Wise, who would go on to direct The Sound of Music, West Side Story, and The Haunting.)  No, if there was a retread, it had already been made: 1943’s The Leopard Man reunited the great Jacques Tourneur with Val Lewton for the third time, after Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, and for the first half it is, by all appearances, a more direct sequel than Wise would make.  To its credit it ultimately reveals itself to be about something entirely different, although not entirely original.

Those previous Tourneur/Lewton collaborations were striking and memorable not least because they brought their stories’ subtext into the foreground: Cat People’s sexual neuroses and I Walked with a Zombie’s preoccupation with death are front and center, and pretty hard to miss.  In this way, they are unique horror films which deal directly with fairly abstract ideas.  But The Leopard Man, based on the novel Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich, is disappointingly straightforward.  It’s a playful film, but ultimately proves to be little more than a simple game.  After a delirious first half in which we’re not even sure who the protagonists are, so much does Tourneur leap from one character to another (as the camera swings out one window or doorway and into the next, in a breathless style reminiscent of Welles), we witness two gruesome deaths.  After a leopard–intended for use in a cabaret show–gets frightened by the click-clacking castanets of a dancer, it breaks free of its leash and runs off into the shadowy streets.  Next we see a young Hispanic girl venturing forth, by her mother’s command, into the night on a random errand, and she is violently attacked by the leopard, which has been lurking in the shadows under a bridge: in the film’s single notorious scene, she pounds upon the door of her home while her oblivious mother only taunts her from inside; by the time the mother has crossed the room, the cries have stopped and blood begins pooling out from underneath the door.  Not much later we witness a second death, as another girl finds herself getting locked into a high-walled cemetery.  Although her screams for help are answered by a friendly voice that offers to go fetch a ladder, the boughs above her bend, as though bearing a great weight–and then snap loose as something unseen leaps free.  In both of these waking nightmares, the victims find themselves trapped against an unbreakable barrier while their calls for help are answered impotently. 

Being stalked by a deadly cat was familiar ground for Tourneur, and he repeats himself with one of the most effective scares from Cat People, building the expectation of an animal attack and then replacing the expected feline roar with that of something similar, for a jolt: in the original film it was a bus, and here he uses it at least twice, most startlingly with a train that passes on the bridge above the first victim, so loud that I actually jumped.  Tourneur might be excused for relying upon an old trick.  Although Cat People was the hit that launched Val Lewton’s run of horror films, critics would not peer so closely.  His films, with their exploitation-ready titles, were not appreciated for their craft for a few more decades; surely it would not be until they began rerunning on television that more and more people took notice of just how special Lewton’s films were.  The Leopard Man, produced so quickly after Cat People, gave Tourneur a chance to refine his technique in the confines of a low-budget genre horror film, a B-picture (66 minutes long) which would be considered disposable entertainment.  So he might be forgiven if he repeats himself here: he is, I believe, trying to tweak what he had previously tried to see if he can amplify the effect, as interested in playing the audience as Hitchcock.

Although it’s somewhat of a relief that The Leopard Man is not actually about a man who turns into a leopard, the second half proves just as routine: when it’s suspected that a killing spree is not an animal’s work but that of a man, the film becomes a standard detective film–and you will correctly guess whodunit long before the big reveal.  Still, the finale is effective and atmospheric, and the events are almost eerily detached from reality.  That dreamlike quality is present in all of Lewton’s films, including The Leopard Man, so that it lingers in the consciousness perhaps more than it ought to.  Even a lesser Lewton & Tourneur, divorced of profound ideas, manages to achieve a haunting quality which eludes the vast majority of horror films.