The Leopard Man (1943) - film review

In New Mexico, Jerry Manning hires a trained leopard as a gimmick for his girlfriend Kiki, a nightclub performer.  On its first night, the leopard takes fright and runs off into the night.  A short while later, a local girl is attacked and killed, apparently by a savage wild animal.  When another woman is found dead with similar wounds in a cemetery, everyone apart from Manning believes the escaped leopard is to blame.  Manning senses there is something strange about this second killing and begins his own investigation, anxious to prevent a third death...

The third and last of Jacques Tourneur’s low budget horror films made under the tutelage of Val Lewton at RKO is less effective than the two films that preceded it -  Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) - but it still manages to be a chilling little thriller, noteworthy for being one of the earliest examples of the psycho-thriller genre.  Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and the spate of gruesome slasher movies it engenered all owe something to this film.  Tourneur was himself dissatisfied with the film, partly because in adapting Cornell Woolrich’s novel Black Alibi he was unable to pursue the supernatural elements which had featured heavily in his previous films.  Whilst The Leopard Man has some superficial similarities with Cat People (it features the same wild cat and was marketed in such a way as to make it appear to be a sequel to that film), it is a far more mundane proposition, with no fantastic plot elements (apart from some tedious fortune-telling nonsense) and a pedestrian murder mystery which is wrapped up too tidily.  

Jacques Tourneur may not have been excited by the undistinguished plot, but this seems not to have dampened his creativity.  The Leopard Man is as visually striking and atmospheric as Tourneur’s previous films, and the director performs miracles with his paltry 150,000 dollars budget (a derisory figure even for an RKO B-movie).   With the help of his cinematographer Robert De Grasse, Tourneur creates a sustained mood of oppression that builds to an intolerable climax just before each of the murders, and it is this sense of anticipation (by the pricking of my thumb, something wicked this way comes...) which makes the film so frightening and memorable.  Sound is used as effectively as the near-expressionistic lighting to build the suspense and give the impression that menace is lurking in every shadow, ready to pounce out at us.  Too bad that the film has to end with a banal stock B-movie plot resolution; too bad that the characters are one-dimensional and the dialogue unspeakably corny in places.  In all other respects, The Leopard Man is virtually faultless - not quite in the same league as Tourneur’s previous horror masterpieces, but a creepy little spine-tingler all the same.

© filmsdefrance.com 2011

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