Description:

A dead-end border town becomes a microcosm of social tension, mortal fear, and the bloody legacies of conquest in THE LEOPARD MAN (1943), the last of producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur’s storied three-film partnership at RKO Pictures. The film’s tightly-constructed narrative follows the repercussions of a stage gimmick gone awry: when a black leopard escapes a nightclub performer’s control and a young girl is subsequently mauled, the New Mexico night takes on an air of lurking, unseen menace. In lieu of a defined main character, THE LEOPARD MAN observes the escalating dread and recrimination among a sharply-rendered cross-section of the town’s inhabitants, from wealthy landowners to Indigenous inhabitants, streetwalkers to pipe-smoking professors. Released within weeks of their justly-revered I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, THE LEOPARD MAN trades its predecessor’s fever-dream atmosphere for a more naturalistic approach, but is every bit as bleakly bone-chilling–and just as scathing in its indictment of colonization. The film concludes with a haunting memorial procession commemorating the slaughter of Natives at the hands of the Conquistadors—a sequence art historian Alexander Nemerov calls “one of the greatest of all Lewton’s scenes.” The enveloping darkness of THE LEOPARD MAN demands to be witnessed in the stark contrast of this black-and-white 35mm print, preserved by the Library of Congress.