#278: The Leopard Man
Cat People 2? Not quite, but…
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 19, 2020.
Initial release: May 8, 1943
Director: Jacques Tourneur
After the success of 1942’s Cat People one could be forgiven for thinking a film like that was a one-time thing. But a guy like Jacques Tourneur can’t be kept down. A year later he would return, with another cat-themed cult classic: The Leopard Man.
Like Cat People, The Leopard Man bridges the gap between horror and noir. Kiki, a nightclub performer in New Mexico, gets talked by Jerry, her manager-slash-boyfriend, into upstaging her rival Clo-Clo by bringing a live leopard out with her in the middle of Clo-Clo’s act. In retaliation, Clo-Clo deliberately startles the leopard, the cat running off into the night.
While the police search for the escaped leopard, a young local girl sent out on an evening trip to the grocer’s is murdered, seemingly by the leopard. Jerry and Kiki are distraught, both of them feeling responsible. But when more bodies start piling up, Jerry starts to get suspicious…
At just over an hour long this is a slim work that still manages to cram in quite a lot of stunning imagery. Tourneur is an underrated genius; his use of light and shadow is nothing short of brilliant, and he builds suspense in a way that even an innocuous sound can scare. Cat People gave us the infamous false scare of a hissing bus; in The Leopard Man, a lengthy, unsettling scene where a young girl takes a shortcut across town to visit the grocer’s gives us a good start with the roar of a train passing overhead on a bridge.
What’s more is the film is probably the first film in Hollywood to make a serious attempt at a realistic portrayal of serial killers. Even today, many serial killers are caricatures, but this film attempts to portray the killer as something other than a deranged psychopath. It’s not like the titular character of Stranger on the Third Floor, a soft-spoken, bug-eyed escapee from a mental hospital who feels compelled to kill. The killer in The Leopard Man is otherwise perfectly ordinary, you wouldn’t know him from anyone else. Tourneur in fact throws some red herrings our way to make us suspect someone else, or perhaps even the leopard, despite the evidence that suggests otherwise. It dares to ask the question: who knows what lurks in the minds of the people you meet?
Serial killers can’t always be spotted, after all.
