Leopard Man, The (1943)
The Leopard Man (1943), produced by Val Lewton, directed by Jacques Tourneur.
First review
If you were in a New Mexico resort town where a black panther was prowling and leaving mangled corpses from time to time, would you go walking around at night? And might it be possible for a murderer to use the cat as cover for his own opportunistic mayhem?
A small film only 66 minutes long, but with plenty of scare moments. It sometimes diverts into little human interest sidelines. From a story by Cornell Woolrich.
Most critics view this as one of the slightest films in the series, but this essayist gets quite a lot of good out of it: The Strange Pleasure of the Leopard Man.
Rambling but heartfelt commentary track by William Friedkin. He tends to summarize what we are already seeing.
Second review
It begins with a publicity stunt: at a nightclub in a New Mexico resort town, a women appears with a black leopard on a leash to spoil another woman's dance routine. It's not so funny when the cat escapes and we have a series of horrific death-by-maulings, and the guilt-inducing knowledge that the rich anglos are abusing the local poor Mexicans.
But wait: we begin to suspect that the cat did only the first killing, and that the others are done by a psycho using the predator as a cover. Who could it be... well, they try some misdirection but there is only one plausible candidate.
Filming on a dark studio lot gives it a dreamlike quality, particularly in the first half. We have three tense murder scenes, all lone women in the dark:
A girl sent out for groceries, running home screaming and begging to be let in -- then her blood flows under the door.
A young woman out to meet her lover is locked in the cemetery after dark. Something is on the walls and in the trees.
The passionate dancer, always playing her castanets, meets something horrific on the dark street which we are not allowed to see.
This is considered one of the minor efforts in Lewton's RKO thriller series, and you can see why. It's not stitched together very well. After 20 minutes we encounter a new set of people and after 40 minutes yet another new group. The resolution is slack, but in a way that is also dreamlike: dreams don't always have climactic resolution, but sort of wander and fade out.
Notes:
A bit I hadn't noticed before: a woman's face is posed like a Madonna, she then puts a cigarette in her mouth and we realize it is the fortune teller.
Female lead Jean Brooks had her best part as the doomed satanist in Lewton's The Seventh Victim (1943).
The film is only 66 minutes long.
Roy Webb score, making use of the castanets motif.
Adapted from a book by Cornell Woolrich (aka William Irish & George Hopley), called the 20th century Poe. Other films from his work: The Window (1949), Rear Window (1954), The Bride Wore Black (1968) and Mississippi Mermaid (1969).
Lewton had the book in his pocket when he arrived at RKO and immediately bought the rights. It was the story he was thinking of when making Cat People (1942).
The studio promoted it as if there might be a man-beast in the film but of course there isn't.
Neither Lewton nor the director were very pleased with the final result.
Available on Blu-ray from Shout Factory with two commentary tracks:
Constantine Nasr gives pleasant, informative notes on the production. Most valuably he reads a long letter from Lewton to his mother written just as he had arrived at RKO, detailing his hopes for his career there.
William Friedkin's commentary is brought forward from the DVD. He sometimes has valuable insights on the film and its influence on his career: "Plot coherence is the enemy of horror, as is explaining too much". Now and then he resorts to obvious narration of what is happening on the screen, but this is not as bad as his stupefying commentary for Vertigo (1958).
