By Oliver Longden
It is fair to say that time has not been kind to The Leopard Man. 70 years after its release it looks hokey, unevenly acted and has a twist ending that looms like a Titanic-sinking iceberg over the second half of the movie. Yet despite its flaws, or perhaps because the distance of history now lets us see them as historical curiosities, The Leopard Man retains a certain primitive power.
The Leopard Man is one of three films directed by Jacques Tourneur for creative producer Val Lewton at RKO pictures which are considered minor masterpieces of the B-movie form. The other two, Cat People and I Walked with Zombie (which also recently reached its 70th anniversary) are generally held to be superior to The Leopard Man, and it’s certainly fair to say that they have aged better than this movie. The Leopard Man concerns a leopard which escapes from captivity during a botched publicity stunt and a rash of murders which follow. They are thought to be the work of the escaped beast but Jerry Manning (Dennis O’Keefe), the promoter torn with guilt over his role in the failed publicity stunt, begins to suspect that other forces may be at work. He and his girlfriend, Kiki (Jean Brooks), the struggling cabaret entertainer who was with the leopard when it escaped, are sucked into the hunt for the animal. They are assisted in their attempt by Dr Galbraith, the man who runs the local museum in their New Mexico town. He takes on the role of all purpose man of science, a vital stock character in B-movie cinema.
The biggest weakness of The Leopard Man to modern eyes is that this a film ultimately about a serial killer, an antagonist supremely common in 21st century drama. Serial killers were little known in the 1940s and still less understood. Those of us raised on the real life crimes of John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein and Fred West or their fictional counterparts have much more experience with fictional depictions of deranged murderers than anyone in 1943. Serial killers have become one of our quintessential bogeymen and have been extensively studied by criminologists and forensic psychologists. We take it for granted that there are those who, through a combination of disposition and childhood trauma, kill for pleasure or to fill some void inside themselves. When we see these individuals on screen we have a narrative all mapped out for them (wildly inaccurate though that narrative might be). In the Leopard Man the killer is ultimately revealed to have been driven mad by the first killing, the only one actually committed by the leopard. It got into his head somehow and drove him to act out homicidal urges. It feels a strange, unsatisfying conclusion for the film to reach because we have our own internalised folk myth of how serial killers are made and we know, or think we know, that people do not just go mad and start killing people apropos of nothing. This sense of crudeness, of a narrative structure still in development drains the film of some of its impact.
Despite these weaknesses I enjoyed watching The Leopard Man. Tourneur’s direction is skilled and the film looks a lot better than it has any right to, considering how cheaply it was made. The film climaxes with a mysterious religious procession through the town which manages to be eerie and evocative despite mainly being heard rather than seen. The mournful song of the procession is a funeral dirge which concentrates the mind on death. It’s a very effective technique. The lighting during the climax is splendid with the heroine encouraging the murderer to turn out the lights, claiming he will be better able to see the parade through the window, but knowing all the time that the darkness will trigger his murderous impulses. The acting is fair to good and the dialogue has that marvellous B-movie charm where people bark exposition at each other in well-mannered staccato bursts. The scene where Jerry explains to Kiki that his poor upbringing has left him believing he needs to show a hard exterior to the world takes only fractionally longer to unfold on screen than the reading of this sentence.
The killings themselves are not particularly graphic, even by the standards of 1940s cinema. The camera is concerned with the set up to the murders, the darkness and the terror which precedes the final act of homicide. The first victim we hear rather than see, killed on the wrong side of her own front door while her domineering mother and her younger brother struggle to open it. The second is killed in a graveyard; we know her fate is sealed as soon as she goes in to meet secretly with a boyfriend, a fatal error in any murder narrative. The final victim is killed in the street in a short sequence with heavy overtones of Jack the Ripper. All three scenes are shot through with a fatalistic quality but enlivened through judicious use of the infamous Lewton Bus technique, an incredibly common horror trope whereby a sudden scare that interrupts a tense scene is revealed to be from an innocuous source (such as a passing bus). Now it seems hackneyed, although still very much in use. Back in 1943 when it was brand new, it must have ramped the tension up to unbearable levels.
Perhaps the best scenes in The Leopard Man are early on when we are still feeling our way through the plot and being tossed the odd red herring. It opens with Kiki in her dressing room preparing to go out, talking with one of the matchbox girls. There is tension early on between Kiki and Clo-Clo, a vibrant and passionate flamenco dancer who is the star attraction of the club whom Kiki is scheming to upstage. When the leopard escapes it initially feels like just another complicating factor in the lives of the characters rather than the key event which will shape the film. Clo-Clo, superbly played by enigmatically monikered Mexican actress Margo, is the most interesting character in the film. She instinctively plays with a set of castanets as she walks and has an almost constant sense of motion even when standing still. She has some of the best moments in the first half of the film, particularly in her interactions with a fortune teller friend. These interactions are pregnant with doom: the fortune teller keeps seeing the same card – the death card – in her readings, and this repeating motif inculcates a potent sense of unease into the early stages of the film before the bodies have started to pile up. They also cleverly raise the possibility of a supernatural element to the film; another red herring, but one which adds to the complexity of the narrative. The female cast and characters are noticeably stronger than the male in The Leopard Man and are unusually prominent in the action, especially early in the film. It’s depressing that this still stands out as unusual, even seventy years after the film was made. Male characters still get about 70% of the screen time in Hollywood.
It’s harder to recommend The Leopard Man as essential viewing than either Cat People or I Walked With a Zombie, both of which have more psychological depth, but it is a neat example of what a B-movie can be when it chafes at the edges of its remit and understands that horrible events have greater power when they cut through an existing narrative. It’s also an interesting attempt to deal realistically with serial killers before they became the unstoppable pop culture phenomenon currently infesting every screen in sight.