Maybe because The Leopard Man (1943) has long been considered one of Val Lewton’s lesser efforts I’ve always liked it best of the nine films he produced for RKO between 1942 and 1946. By the time I got to them, so many of Lewton’s other titles in that great series of horror films (initiated by RKO to compete with the lucrative monster rallies of rival studio Universal) felt over-considered and untouchable, like fragile objets d’art safeguarded under glass. As “classics,” the relative assets of The Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and Curse of the Cat People (1945) were set in stone and my own hotheaded defense of The Leopard Man was I suppose my way of claiming it as my own, as I had picked 13 for a lucky number because no one else would want it. The Leopard Man was the first Lewton film I bought on video cassette, I own it now as part of the Lewton box set, and it always seems to be the one I find myself rewatching on Turner Classic Movies. Something about the film brings me back to it again and again.

It took me a number of years and a number of repeat viewings of The Leopard Man to appreciate it as a study of misperception, both on a personal level as a denial of driving emotions, and also on a broader level in the way that people see (or fail to see) one another. Lewton and Tourneur set the tone for misperception right away with a camera move that brings us from the opening credits to a view of a woman we assume will be a principal player… only to have that POV yanked to one side, where we are introduced to someone else entirely. As our angle on Clo-Clo (Mexican actress Margo), the Flamenco dancer whose castanets cut the night air like a sidewinder’s rattle, shifts to her performing rival Kiki Walker (Jean Brooks, who went from this to The Seventh Victim), Lewton and company are at once tipping us off-balance to maintain an aura of uncertainty and supporting the film’s theme of human interconnection. This bit of cinematographic legerdemain also reflects the reality that most of Lewton’s RKO horrors employed a bait-and-switch, luring moviegoers in with the lurid promise of a gaudy title only to offer them something far more sophisticated and even poetic.

This first scene has barely begun when we experience yet another unsettling jolt in the appearance of a leopard in Kiki’s dressing room. Kiki screams and jumps up onto her make-up table as the leopard enters… on the end of a leash held by Jerry Manning (Dennis O’Keefe), her agent and lover. In "a tough town for blondes," Jerry has rented the animal from a local man to help give his fair-haired client an edge over the more exotic Clo-Clo. But as no good deed goes unpunished, the leopard breaks loose from its leash and escapes from the nightclub into the night… setting The Leopard Man in motion with a series of savage killings in and around a small New Mexico town.

As The Leopard Man is only 66 minutes long, the notion that the string of subsequent killings of women may not attributable to the escaped leopard but to a psychopath masking his crimes by making them look like the work of a wild animal comes early on, as a theory of Jerry to ease his guilty conscience for having started the whole mess (although Clo-Clo, whose castanets startled the animal, bears some part of the blame as well). The identify of the real killer won’t be too hard to figure out, principally because there just aren’t that many suspects, but The Leopard Man is as far from being a simple whodunit as The Cat People is from being a spookshow.  Lewton, Tourneur and scenarist Ardel Wray are less interested in the pathology of murder or in amateur detectives than they are in isolating the social structures that leave people vulnerable and make serial murder not only a possibility but an inevitability.

This early serial killer story eschews the easy out of having its villain be a Hannibal Lector-style super-predator, making him instead a pathetic and lonely man whose impulse to do harm is sparked by the very thing that has prompted the callous showbiz hero and heroine to accept their own part in the tragedy… acknowlegement of the suffering of others.  What makes The Leopard Man ahead of its time is its refusal to lay responsibility solely at the feet of the murderer.  Victims die here not only because a killer is on the loose but because they have been let down by others, because people lack faith, because they give up on one another.  The film is unabashedly class conscious.  First victim Teresa Delgado is as much a victim of poverty and her mother's misplaced house pride as she is of the leopard.  Second victim Consuela dies because she must meet her lower class lover on the sly and is left isolated and vulnerable to attack; third victim Clo-Clo dies because she must leave the safety of her home to retrieve a lost bank note, a gift from a kind older man (overcompensating for the loss of his own daughter's affection) who hoped to ease the burden of this single mother but instead seals her doom.  Surrounding each death is a chain of shared responsibility, making it not so difficult to understand why the film was a bitter pill for World War II era audiences and critics. 

Beyond these heady interpretations, there’s much to love about The Leopard Man, from its irreverent sense of humor (I love the transition from a sad funeral parlor scene to what seems to be a Catholic Madonna… who then lifts a cigarette into the frame and takes a drag) to its meandering narrative, which leapfrogs from character to character (like a kind of Typhoid Mary, Clo-Clo passes her bad luck onto others before she ultimately falls victim to “the death card” slapped down by local fortune teller Isabel Jewel) in a way that indie pics such as Slacker (1991) and Pulp Fiction (1993) claimed to invent fifty years later. The spare score by Roy Webb and expressive cinematography of noir specialist Robert De Grasse (Born to Kill, Follow Me Quietly) make the film distinctly pleasurable to watch, like a dream you can actually stop and appreciate while you’re in the middle of it.

For too long The Leopard Man has been judged for all the things it isn’t and needs to be reevaluated for what it does do very well. Even if you’ve watched the movie before, I ask you… have you seen The Leopard Man?

This post is my belated contribution to the Val Lewton Blog-a-Thon hosted by Michael Guillén's The Evening Class film blog, comemorating the release of the Martin Scorsese-produced documentary Val Lewton: Man in the Shadows.  There are a lot of contributions and many more takes on The Leopard Man, so get busy!