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The Leopard Man
USA 1943
produced by Val Lewton for RKO
directed by Jacques Tourneur
starring Dennis O'Keefe, Margo, Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell, James Bell, Margaret Landry, Abner Biberman, Tula Parma (= Tuulikki Paananen), Ben Bard, Jacqueline deWit, Fely Franquelli, Robert Andersen, William Halligan, Ariel Heath, Elias Gamboa, Kate Drain Lawson, Bobby Spindola, Charles Lung, Jacques Lory, Richard Martin, Belle Mitchell, Ottola Nesmith, Betty Roadman, Rosa Rita Varella, Marguerita Sylva, David Cota
screenplay by Ardel Wray, additional dialogue by Edward Dein, based on the novel Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich, music by Roy Webb
review by Mike Haberfelner
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To spice up her act at a fancy night club, press agent Manning (Dennis
O'Keefe) provides his client (and girlfriend) Kiki (Jean Brooks) with a
tame leopard she is to keep on a leash during her performance. But the
castanetas of fellow dancer Clo-Clo (Margo) frighten the beast so it tears
itself away from Kiki and escapes from the night club into the open. A
search party is immediately organized, but to no avail. That same night,
Teresa (Margaret Landry) is sent to the grocer's for some flour by her
mother (Kate Drain Lawson) - and she's brutally mauled by the leopard on
her way home. A posse is formed to hunt down the animal, led by local
zoologist (and the closest the town has to a leopard-expert) Galbraith
(James Bell), and Manning makes it a point to be part of it, but the
animal just cannot be found. Not long after that, a local girl, Consuela
(Tuulikki Paananen), awaiting her lover in a graveyard is killed by the
beast - or was it indeed the leopard, as at this hour the graveyard was
already closed and the girl actually locked in, so it's at best
questionable as to why the leopard would have made its way into the
cemetery. After a long night out, castaneta-wielding Clo-Clo is on her
way home, slightly on edge as a fortune teller (Isabel Jewell) has
predicted doom, and sure enough, she's killed by the leopard - but then
the leopard is found, dead and probably killed a week ago, and skinned
even, so it's more than likely that both Consuela and Clo-Clo have not
been killed by another leopard (which are not local to the area) but a man
using the skin to leave clues pointing to the leopard, and eventually
suspicion falls on Galbraith - but how to prove his guilt before he kills
again? Of course, the title of this movie suggests a cash-in on
Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur's successs Cat
People from only one year prior, and on a purely technical level, The
Leopard Man sure keeps the promise of the earlier movie, it's big on
atmosphere, refrains from showing everything and creating a bigger impact
doing so, and putting an emphasis on psychology rather than action. Only
on a scipt level The Leopard Man fails to live up to Cat
People as it fails to find its central character, seems to instead
jump back and forth between several characters without allowing the
audience to really identify with any. Plus the very grounded serial killer
solution might work very well in Cornell Woolrich's source novel, but he's
a crime rather than horror writer, and within the context of Lewton and
Tourneur's rather dreamlike world, the resolution feels a bit lacking in
the poetic department - if the finale during a procession of hooded monks
is visually quite impressive. In all, the film's still well worth a look,
as it shows director Tourneur at the height of his game, and even without
a proper point of identification, it's thus a very creepy movie.
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