The Leopard Man

Do leopards smoke cigarettes? Based on a Cornell Woolrich novel, Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man answers that question and stars Dennis O’Keefe as Jerry Manning, who offers his girlfriend Kiki (Jean Brooks) a black leopard to enliven her nightclub act and steal attention from her competitive co-worker Clo-clo (Margo). When the envious Clo-clo scares away the cat with her castanets, it escapes from the club and begins terrorizing the town, particularly single, pretty women who begin showing up dead. Produced by Val Lewton, famous at RKO for horror films, The Leopard Man includes gorgeous studio-designed outdoor sets lit to perfection when characters get locked in a graveyard at night or cross a craggy ditch to buy evening cornmeal for their mother. In addition to being widely recognized as the first American serial killer movie, the film unconventionally introduces new characters who the camera follows as they experience their own mini-narrative leading up to their murder, presumably by the leopard, but possibly by a human psychopath; women alone at night are a Val Lewton specialty. While the initial nightclub scenes might evoke Bringing Up Baby five years earlier, things quickly take a dark turn when a mother locks her young daughter out of the house as punishment; the girl’s begging to come back in precedes her blood pooling under the door. Cinematographer Robert De Grasse uses reflection and shadow to eerie effect, like to project a character’s leopard shadow puppets or to reflect a woman’s gyrations past the fountain water.