The Leopard Man (1943)

Presumably wishing to cash in on the unexpected success of his Cat People, RKO handed Val Lewton  another feline title and told him to do it again. Leopard... Man. Now, the title Cat People isn't so bad, maybe even has a certain je ne sais quoi; you can do something with Cat People, which is probably why Lewton elected to do it first of the list of titles they gave him when they hired him. The best of a bad lot. I Walked With A Zombie? Have the lead crack wise about the title's tabloid style, acknowledge its awfulness in the first line of dialogue in the film and put it behind you. But Leopard Man? Clearly an attempt to marry the success of Cat People to Universal's Wolf Man of the previous year, how does one get over a stumbling block of this magnitude?

Well, Lewton and three time co-conspirator Jacques Tourneur manage it, but though it contains one of the very best suspense sequences in the Lewton canon, the whole is considerably less memorable than some of its parts (to mangle a phrase). I'm often working from memory here, which is why you should always double check anything you read on the internet, particularly in a blog. So I admit that it's been a while since I saw The Leopard Man, but it's unusual for me not to remember anything about the characters in a film. The plot is also the weakest in the bunch thus far: jungle cat escaped from zoo becomes convenient scapegoat for sex-killer (no, there's no mention of rape, but the victims, as the poster screams, are all women, which means the killer has a predilection). It's an idea lifted wholesale from Cat People, in which Simone Simon releases a panther from its cage before finally giving way to her own animal nature.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect is one I had forgotten: Lewton sets it against the backdrop of Mexico's Day Of The Dead, the sad upshot of which is that, for the second picture in a row, though we are still firmly located in the present, we are out of the city. Cat People and The Seventh Victim profited immeasurably from their urban Amercan settings; I Walked With A Zombie left the city for a tropical island, but the setting was interesting and necessary to the voodoo plot. Leopard Man takes place in Mexico, but aside from the added colour provided by the death obsessed festivities, there's no very good reason for it to do so, and that dash of flavour is not enough to make up for the loss of the city. On the other hand, we do get the classic scene in which a little girl, suspected of malingering by her mother, is sent on an errand after sundown. Not believed when she pounds on the locked door of her home and shrieks that she is being chased -- and not allowed in, to teach her a lesson -- her mother is finally convinced when the girl's blood leaks in under the door. Oh, sorry: SPOILER ALERT.

Ultimately, however, this one is most interesting in context as part of Lewton's total canon, though on that count alone it is one of the most interesting films of 1943.