Review: The Leopard Man (1943)

The night is dark. The girl is young. And frightened. She didn't want to go to the store. She didn't want to get the cornmeal. She knew about the leopard that had escaped from the club and was frightened. But her mother chided her for being afraid, and her little brother made fun of her. So out she went into the dark. Her mother bolted the door behind her and told her she would't be allowed back in unless she came back with the cornmeal for the tortillas.

On her way back from the second store (the first store she went to was closed, and the owner's wife didn't want to open up again, if even for a minute), she must pass beneath the train bridge again. In the darkness, she can see two points of light--the glowing eyes of the escaped leopard. A train suddenly passes overhead. When she looks again, the eyes are gone. but when she emerges from the underpass, the leopard is sitting atop the embankment. She screams. The leopard springs after her. She runs for her life, spilling the cornmeal.

She pounds on the door of her family's home. "Mamacita!" she screams, "If you love me, let me in! Mamacita!"

Her mother is unimpressed and thinks her daughter silly for being so afraid. "It's coming closer--I can see it!" The girl screams one last time. There's a sickening "thud" against the door, and what sounds like an animal snarling. "Wait, Teresa," the girl's mother says. "I come. I will let you in." But it's too late--the only answer her mother receives to her cries is her daughter's blood flowing beneath the door.

The scene above, one of the most intense and unnerving in any horror film, is from The Leopard Man, the third collaboration between RKO producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur (after Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie)--and, unfortunately, the last. They play with big kitties again in this mystery set in New Mexico.

The agent (Dennis O'Keefe) for a dancer (Jean Brooks) devises a plan to draw attention away from her rival, a flamboyant flamenco dancer (Margo): His client will walk into the club where they perform with a leopard on a leash. Great plan...till the flamenco dancer frightens the cat and it dashes off into the night. When the young girl is killed, the agent and dancer are torn apart with guilt. But when two more women die in a similar manner, the agent becomes suspicious: Is the leopard responsible for these new deaths, or is something--or someONE--else responsible?

It's not too difficult to figure out what's going on in The Leopard Man. Because Tourneur and screenwriter Ardel Wray spend a lot of time on introducing us to characters who, in very short order, are knocked off, there are very few characters that carry from the beginning of the movie to the end, thus cutting the suspect list down to next to nothing. And we know it's not the leopard killing off all the pretty girls--the title tips you off to that, and the trailer (included on the newly released DVD) flat-out says there's a human killer on the loose. That leaves the viewer to admire the style of the movie, which, like all of the Lewton/Tourneur features, is great to look at, visually elegant and restrained. (Go back to the scene above. We don't see Teresa die--hearing her beign torn apart is more than enough for the imagination to fill in the rest.)

But The Leopard Man is less engaging than most of Lewton's other features, perhaps because the mystery is so easily solved, because there is no supernatural element present (despite what the title implies) and because all of the characters who get terrorized in this movie are young, beautiful women, thus qualifying The Leopard Man as an early prototype of the mad slasher film.

I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing.