The Leopard Man

A lipstick and makeup mirror slip from fear-frozen hands, a sack spills corn flour along a grassy trail, a ball floats atop a geyser of water, the rattlesnake whir of castanets, blood seeps in from below a heavy door: The Leopard Man (1943), the third in auteur producer Val Lewton’s cycle of low-budget horror films for RKO, and his last collaboration with the great B-movie director Jacques Tourneur, brims with such haunting, often eerily erotic sounds and images. While its horror-noir narrative is characteristically busy and compressed—the runtime is a brisk 66 minutes—the film seems to move not from plot development to plot development but, rather, along a network of wordless moments characterized by their shared air of inevitable doom.

An adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s Black Alibi credited to scenarists Edward Dein and Ardel Wray—the latter also worked on Lewton and Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943)—The Leopard Man boasts a structure so peculiar as to seem avant-garde, employing baton-passing transitions that wouldn’t be domesticated until decades later in movies like L’argent (1983) or Slacker (1990). Set in a nameless New Mexico border town, the film has clearly demarcated protagonists: nightclub promotor Jerry (Dennis O’Keefe) and his performer girlfriend Kiki (Jean Brooks, who would feature memorably in Lewton’s The Seventh Victim, released the same year). Things are set in motion when Jerry attempts a publicity stunt by having Kiki stride onto the nightclub patio with a leopard on a leash. Fellow performer Clo-Clo (Mexican actress Margo), not one to be upstaged, startles the leopard with the aforementioned castanets, prompting the animal to flee into the night. As a string of slayings follow, Jerry and Kiki pose as cynics indifferent to the bloodshed for which they’re indirectly to blame, though each quietly endeavours to locate the leopard and, later, apprehend what appears to be a serial killer.

This A-story is fine, yet all of The Leopard Man’s most arresting sequences are those that lure peripheral characters into the foreground: a poor teenage girl ordered out into the night to buy wares for her family or a more affluent young woman attempting to rendezvous with her lover in, of all places, a cemetery. These women are linked only by destiny, both of them targets of an antagonist that, echoing the ambiguities of Lewton and Tourneur’s Cat People (1942), may be man or beast. There is also a series of appearances from a zoologist-turned-curator played by the wonderful character actor James Bell, who has always reminded me a little of Steve Buscemi, and who was also featured in I Walked with a Zombie. Bell is granted The Leopard Man’s most eloquent bit of casual philosophy, speaking of the unknowable roots of our impulses. In Lewton’s cosmology, we each seek either logic or lyricism in the arc of our lives, yet are bound to succumb to motives and actions that are inscrutable, drawing us closer to some unfathomable abyss.