Come for the cat1, stay for the characters.
When this 66-minute Jacques Tourneur film goes for chills, it does so beautifully. Look at the ratcheting-up of tension and dread as young Terésa (Margaret Landry) is chased home by an escaped leopard. She batters at her front door, pleading for her mother to let her inside; her mother, assuming it’s all a lot of fuss over nothing, deliberately takes her time—until she hears her daughter’s bloodcurdling scream. Then she flies over, but panic and terror make her clumsy: she can’t get the door open either. Her young son beats at the lock with a piece of firewood. Now there is silence on the other side of the door, and a dark pool of blood seeps in and—this is the visual kicker, the touch that convinces—branches into a T as it follows the crack between the floorboards.
It’s an incredibly executed horror scene, and it’s enriched because Tourneur gives us a sense of life as well as death. This is a movie full of people, not just leopard—or leopard man—chew toys. The violence of Terésa’s death is as emotional as it is physical. It’s about instantly knowing that her mother, who sent her out alone in the night for cornmeal despite Terésa’s fear of the leopard, who dallied and rolled her eyes at what she thought were her daughter’s dramatics—who made the fatal assumption that ordinary life would go on being ordinary, in short—will not recover from this.
The Leopard Man moves fluidly among its cast, sometimes setting up and resolving characters in relatively tight vignettes and sometimes seeding them to pay off later. It starts with Kiki (Jean Brooks), a nightclub performer in a backwater part of New Mexico, and her boyfriend, promoter Jerry (Dennis O’Keefe), who help kick off the plot—Jerry rents a leopard that Kiki can use to upstage the club’s star performer, Clo-Clo (Margo), and the cat gets loose—and eventually it ends with them, older and wiser and broken into a new tenderness.
But in the meantime, we’ve been with a lot of other people, and they’ve all taken on more complex hues than you might expect. Clo-Clo, for example, introduced as a queen bee whose castanets are driving Kiki mad—and who antagonizes the leopard, no less, provoking it to run—turns out to be funny, warmhearted, and practical. Her family calls her Gabriella, giving her an entire real life Kiki and Jerry never even seem to know. People have affairs of the heart, even if they know they might need to put them aside. They have relationships with their parents. A poor grocer lets Terésa have the cornmeal she needs on credit, because he knows her and knows they’re in the same boat. Charlie (Abner Biberman), the leopard’s original owner, has a history with his pet and his own moral qualms. A fortuneteller, introduced as a kind of faceless bad omen, turns out to be almost a friend, one who’s nervous about how often the death card keeps coming up. Even the leopard is a character, one who can be misinterpreted.
It’s incredible how much deft, textured characterization this packs into a runtime that barely cracks an hour. It makes the horror more varied and more lingering, because when you care about characters, a film can drum up tension from risking their happiness and sense of peace, not just their lives and limbs.
Somehow, into all of this, Tourneur folds an explicit lesson against closing yourself off, some implicit observations about white privilege2, a nuanced portrait of a specific locale, and a haunting idea about the psychological scarring of bearing witness to violence. It has the slightly open-ended feel, and certainly the depth, of a good short story, one where the richness is all the more remarkable for how compact it is. Lovely October viewing.
The Leopard Man is streaming on HBO Max.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
This professor is history.
Anthologized
Arguably one of the best Twilight Zone episodes, and definitely one of the most Twilight Zone episodes.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Serial Experiments Lain, Episode Six, “Kids”
A few different plot threads come together here. The most charming one is that Lain has gained confidence and assertiveness; it’s rare to see a character as passive as Lain become an active one this quickly, and it’s tied to her increasing popularity in the Wired. She finds herself a hanger-on who explicitly tries to leech off her popularity; she also finds this popularity doesn’t specifically transfer to the real world, as her friends are confused by her. The show also chooses to translate this to a visual by having kids reach up to a vision of her in the sky in almost religious awe.
She ends up in conversation with the convicted childkiller who created the original program that we’ve seen kids using to kill each other; there’s some scifi justification for it in that it’s connected to psychic powers, but this is mainly about Lain’s moral outrage at his seeming indifference. This does speak to how absolutely anyone can seem to contact absolutely anyone through the internet, and how some guy from Australia can have these kinds of conversations with some guy from California. The episode also ends with Lain meeting the weird tech guys, who seem to be defending her from some other bad guys.
Seinfeld, “The Finale” – and so it ends! I can kinda see why this was a little disappointing for people at the time, although I’m not sure what kind of grand ending they really expected from a “show about nothing”. I definitely wouldn’t rank it particularly highly myself but I still thought it was a pretty fun way to sign off, with a parade of past characters returning to air their grievances and the characters finally experiencing some consequences for their actions. Plus, Jackie Chiles is hilarious so it was good to get one more solid appearance from him.
The Twilight Zone, “People Are Alike All Over” – Is it possible to be TOO subtle in your morality play? More tomorrow.
Elementary, “Bits and Pieces” – The mystery itself is pretty interesting: why were two skin graft recipients killed in arsons? And what does it have to do with bird flu? But we have the added complication that Holmes cannot remember six hours of his day due to his condition, and cannot explain why there is an embalmed head in his possession. Maybe they decided there wasn’t enough story, or maybe they just decided this would be fun to play out, and it was. We also get Sherlock being forced to tell Gregson about his medical status, and Gregson making it clear that he once again cannot trust Sherlock to be honest. And the serial killer, having failed to engage Sherlock sufficiently by trying to push Sherlock to find his latest victim, vows to redouble his efforts to “help.” The serial killer stuff is not very interesting so far.
Barney Miller, “Community Relations” – Cases overlap: a slumlord tries to force out one holdout; a blind man shoplifts at a department store; Wojo is pressed by an Assistant DA on his testimony in a case. Before it ends, Barney has gotten the now-unhoused man and the blind man to move in together and help each, even as the DA tears the slumlord a new one. Mixing and matching stuff can be very effective.
Like Cat People, this does a lot with very little and with far more implication of violence than actual violence. Oh that they made more horror like this!
It really is superb. Tourneur also does a ton with sound, both here and in Cat People, which really helps bolster this kind of implied horror.
Carpenter said years ago that sound design is the only element of a horror movie that you cannot fuck up. You can lean into other deficiencies as stylistic choices, but audiences won’t sit still for poor sound.
That sense of spacial instability generated by what is outside of the frame of visibility is what gives horror its kick. Lewton’s films all have a terrific sense of visual texture but Turneur really knew how to punctuate that space with exterior signifiers of foreboding and dread.
Year of the Month updates:
This November, you can write about anything from 1968 — here’s some lists of movies, albums, books, and TV to get you started.
Nov. 8th: Tristan Nankervis: Night of the Living Dead
Nov. 22nd: Tristan Nankervis: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
And there’s still time to write about any of these movies, albums, books from 1998 this October.
Oct. 30th: Gillian Nelson: Halloweentown