Is Jacques Tourneur the laziest director ever? He let the audience do all the work. At least he did when making little suspense programmers under producer Val Lewton, who headed RKO's second-feature unit in the wartime 1940s. Hamstrung by parsimonious budgets, they racked their brains for ways to make their movies look good and pack a wallop. Their solutions proved inspired, resulting in a string of classics The Cat People, The Leopard Man, I Walked With A Zombie that still rank among the moodiest, most memorable fright-films ever made (with different directors, Lewton oversaw The Seventh Victim and other distinctive works in the same vein). With The Leopard Man, Tourneur was handed a script that showed little promise; when he was finished with it, it shone with his distinctive black magic. That magic was to suggest rather than to show; to plant seeds in viewers' imaginations and let them grow.
In a sleepy New Mexico town that somehow supports a posh night club, publicity man Dennis O'Keefe gets an idea to promote an act by arranging for the star (Jean Brooks) to make a grand entrance with a big black leopard on a leash. The cat escapes and soon the deaths begin.
First a girl sent out into the night to fetch cornmeal for mama's tortillas finds the corner store closed and must venture further afield. Tumbleweeds stirred up by the dry winds and trains hurtling over trellises are unnerving enough, but then something else starts its pursuit. She almost makes it back safely but the lock is stuck....
Next another young woman sets off in late afternoon for an assignation with her boyfriend at the cemetery. When he doesn't show, she loses track of time and improvidently finds herself locked in among the gravestones and statuary....
A posse sets out to find and kill the leopard, but O'Keefe begins to doubt whether the killer is in fact feline. It's in the resolution (based on a story by Cornell Woolrich) that the script ultimately disappoints, but the trip to it remains a dark ride. Those minuscule budgets didn't compromise the movie's decadently glossy looks, and the extraordinary Roy Webb's castanet-ridden score keeps the tension taut (one high, sustained, almost pianissimo chord hangs over the cemetery scene). The mistress of the castanets, a cabaret dancer called Clo-Clo, is an actress called Margo; the ace of spades keeps turning up in her fortune. Her performance lends The Leopard Man what little heart it shows.
