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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.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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