© 2008 William Ahearn
Val Lewton, the producer of the 1943 film “The Leopard Man” is going through a bit of a revival recently thanks to the efforts of Martin Scorsese. Scorsese also revived interest in the work of Michael Powell who directed the classic serial killer film “Peeping Tom” and was ostracized by the British film companies for making such a disturbing film.
Lewton – who is known for low-key and intelligent horror movies – produced three films with director Jacques Tourneur (whose “Out of the Past” is a classic of American film noir), “Cat People,” “I Walked With a Zombie,” and “The Leopard Man.” I recently saw “The Ghost Ship” that Newton produced and it is an odd and haunting character study that was withheld from distribution for decades due to litigation.
But it wasn’t Val Lewton or Jacques Tourneur that attracted me to “The Leopard Man.” It was Cornell Woolrich, the author of the novel Black Alibi that the film is based on that made me want to see it. Woolrich’s work goes in and out of print and recently Hard Case Crime re-issued Woolrich’s Fright after a half-century hiatus, just to give an example. Woolrich is one of my favorite writers, crime or otherwise, and seeing “The Leopard Man” covered both the serial killer series and an on-going series of seeing all the films made from Woolrich’s novels and stories.
The story of “The Leopard Man” involves a publicity agent and his star client and love interest. To upstage a competitor in a New Mexico nightclub, the agent arranges for the star to enter the nightclub with a tame black leopard on the end of a leash. The star’s competitor startles the leopard and it escapes. Then the killings begin. And then the cat is found dead and cleared of the second and third murders. It’s a nice, moody whodunit without all of the usual clichés.
As a film, “The Leopard Man” is of more interest to Lewton, Tourneur, or Woolrich fans than to serial killer buffs but it’s an excellent film for its time and place as it attempts to articulate what drives a serial killer. It does have a romantic couple – as films of this era often do – yet it’s a far more realistic and satisfying one for the viewer than the usual Hollywood pairings in horror films. Also notable is that the killer isn’t some low-life or desperate criminal but an educated member of the community as we see in the fictional Hannibal Lector.