by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 9 my husband Charles and I watched two more movies from the Warner Home Video boxed set of nine movies produced by Val Lewton for RKO between 1942 and 1946: The Leopard Man I1943) and The Body Snatcher (1945). The Leopard Man was the third and last collaboration between Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur, the French-born son of another prominent director,Maurice Tourneur. Previously Lewton and Tourneur had made Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, the latter of which Tourneur described as “a terrible title for a very good film – the best film I’ve ever done in my life.” (The imdb.com page on Val Lewton has one quote from him, taken from a letter to his sister in which he wrote, “You shouldn't get mad at the New York reviewers. Actually, it's very difficult for a reviewer to give something called I Walked with a Zombie a good review.”) Alas, Tourneur’s reminiscences of The Leopard Man in his interview for the Charles Higham-Joel Greenberg book The Celluloid Muse were considerably less positive: “It was too exotic, it was neither fish nor fowl, a series of vignettes, and it didn’t hold together.” The main problem with The Leopard Man was it was a mystery whodunit masquerading as a horror film. The original trailer made it look like a male version of Cat People or a feline knockoff of Universal’s The Wolf Man (1941) – which itself had been referred to in Cat People in which Tom Conway’s character ironically joked to Kent Smith’s when he was about to confront the cat person, “Maybe I should have a gun with a silver bullet.”
Instead it was based on a novel by noir writer Cornell Woolrich called Black Alibi and takes place in a town on the U.S.-Mexico border in the Southwest. Tourneur recalled the locale as Mexico, but it isn’t; the town sheriff, though called “Robles” (Ben Bard), is a white man who speaks unaccented English, and all too many of the actors playing Mexicans speak in terrible Frito Bandito accents. A press agent named Jerry Manning (Dennis O’Keefe), worried that his client and girlfriend Kiki Walker (Jean Brooks, first wife of writer/director Richard Brooks, who would go on to an unforgettable appearance as the title character of Lewton’s next film, The Seventh Victim) would be upstaged by the local dancer Clo-Clo (Margo, a Mexican actress who made her screen debut in the 1934 film Crime Without Passion, playing the mistress of a super-lawyer who kills her and uses his legal knowledge to cover up his crime; her most famous role was in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon [1937], in which she played the woman who ages immediately once she’s taken out of Shangri-La), rents a black leopard (portrayed by an animal named “Dynamite” who was the same beast who played the black panther in Cat People) from a Native American named Charlie How-Come (Abner Biberman). Charlie How-Come has toured out of a carnival wagon with the animal for over 10 years, and he bills himself as “The Leopard Man.” He’s also drawn with a level of sensitivity and pathos, representing Lewton’s usual depictions of people of color as fully multidimensional characters instead of racist stereotypes.
Manning’s deal with Charlie How-Come is he’ll pay $10 to rent the leopard for one night, but will owe him $225 if anything happens to the beast. Unfortunately, while Kiki makes her dramatic entrance at the local club (an outdoor venue with a large fountain which I suspect was recycled from the 1940 RKO film Too Many Girls, best known as the movie on which Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz first met), the leopard panics and escapes. A Mexican teenage girl named Teresa Delgado (Margaret Lsndry) is sent out by her mother (Kate Drain Lawson) to buy corn meal so the family can have fresh tortillas, but in one of the film’s few great sequences she arrives too late at the mercado, is forced to go across town to a market that is still open, and on her way home she’s attacked and ultimately killed by the fugitive leopard. Lewton and Tourneur worked out an effect similar to the famous “bus” scene in Cat People in which Teresa is momentarily startled by what turns out to be the sound of a passing train, and she’s finally set upon and killed by the leopard just as she’s outside her home and pleading in vain for her mom to unlock the door and let her in. Mom had previously locked it and told her she wouldn’t be let back in until she brought the corn flour (which she’d dropped in her previous flight) and it’s only when her brother realizes what’s going on and forces open the lock that the door finally opens – too late, as we’ve learned by a stream of Teresa;s blood flowing under the door and into the Delgado home. (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this effect in an earlier movie, but it’s still a chilling scene and a very Lewtonesque way of indicating the death of a character.)
Later Consuelo Contreras (Tula Parma) also goes out at night to leave flowers on the grave of her father – and to meet a boyfriend named Raoul Belmonte (Richard Martin) – only the groundskeeper of the cemetery warns her he’s going to lock the front gates at 6 when he closes for the night. Consuelo misses the man’s warning signal and is trapped in the cemetery, where a man approaches and offers to get a ladder so she can leave – onliy she gets killed. Later Clo-Clo also gets. killed when she goes out at night to retrieve a $100 bill her sugar daddy gave h er. The police assume it’s the leopard striking again, but Jerry Manning is convinced that Consuelo and Clo-Clo were actually murdered by a human, a psychopath who yielded to temptation and knocked oer off in a way that made it seem like the leopard killed her. The original trailer gave away the fact that the second and third killings were human murders, and it’s not that big a deal to figure out whodunit: it’s Dr. Galbraith (James Bell, who’d had a smaller but more interesting role as the hapless Western doctor in I Walked with a Zombie). He’s been hanging around the action peripherally and giving bits and pieces of exposition about the killing habits of both leopards and the humans who emulate them, and he makes his living running a small museum of local artifacts. Ultimately Jerry and Kiki expose him as the murderer and Raoul, Consuelo's boyfriend, shoots him – whereupon Sheriff Robles reluctantlyi arrests him.
The Leopard Man has some genuinely creative uses of sound – Clo-Clo likes to walk around clinging away with her castanets, and the sound of them becomes a Leitmotif on the soundtrack until she’s killed ‘But there were too many bad scenes,” Tourneur told Higham and Greenberg, “and even though we used an effective Mexican birthday song, the effect was spotty, uneven.” Charlkes noted that the film was essentially a reworking of I Walked with a Zombie – they’re both clashes of cultures set in towns of uncertain loyalty where indigenous and Western cultures meet – but I Walked with a Zombie is a much deeper, richer film and the culture clashes in Zombie are far more important. I Walked with a Zombie is about the entire heritage of the New World and how slavery shaped it to the extenit that almost a century after it was abolished, great families were living off the fortunes their ancestors had accumulated on the backs of slaves and dealing with the moral corruption of that, while The Leopard Man is more or less a straightforward whodunit with an exotic locale.
