Kiki Walker’s (Jean Brooks) boyfriend and manager, Jerry Manning (Dennis O’Keefe), brings a tame leopard to a restaurant as a publicity stunt which backfires when fellow performer Clo-Clo (Margo) frightens it with her castanets. Soon after, the leopard kills a girl, and soon after, more. Museum curator James Bell Dr. Galbraith helps in the hunt for the cat as the only educated person around. But Jerry doesn’t believe the additional deaths were due to the animal, and suggests a human is at work.
This is another RKO horror film from the master of low-budgets, Val Lewton. If you haven’t read my other reviews, the quick summation is: Lewton was given a film title, a painfully small budget, and a runtime limit of 77 minutes, but otherwise, freedom to do what he liked. He used that freedom to make expressionistic fairy-tales, filled with shadows and fear and questions of life and death. The financial limitations, as well as the runtime, did harm the films, making them less than they might have been, but they are far more than they have any right to be. Lewton was a producer, and the films were completely his, but for his first three films, he was blessed with Jacques Tourneur, a director who knew how to shoot darkness. The two worked excellently together. Unfortunately, The Leopard Man is the last of their collaborations.
I hate to tie so many earlier films to the slasher craze of the ‘80s, but there’s no way around it. The Leopard Man is a proto-slasher, and better than most that followed. Unlike other films of killers at the time, this one changes its focus from character to character, introducing us to the victims. For a large section of the movie, I didn’t know who the leads were, and that works here, getting us to care about those about to die.
Lewton’s films are always close to death and depression. The Leopard Man is suffused with malaise. Few people are happy, and the ones that seem to be…, well, it doesn’t work out well. And there are symbols of death everywhere. The lovers meet in a graveyard, one with a caretaker that prefers the dead. A fortune teller repeatedly deals out the death card, and then tries to hide it. The climax takes place during procession of weird, almost Silent Hill-looking cloaked figures, marking the day when local natives had been slaughtered by the Spanish. It’s gloomy, and beautiful.
This is about as stressful of a film as you’ll ever see. The treks through the darkened streets are disorienting, and tense. This is Lewton and Tourneaur at the top of their game. While in those back allies, with darkness all around and some unknown thing following, this is Lewton’s best picture and one of the best of the decade.
It is at those time, but not all the time.
For a film this good, it almost had to fall. 66 minutes isn’t enough time. The scares and macabre tone are great. The mystery is less interesting. The killer was obvious to me as soon as the character came on screen. And uncovering the murderer was way to fast. The Leopard Man would have been better with no solution. Leave it all uncertain. Like most of Lewton’s films, it doesn’t all come together, but what’s good is very good.