Director: Jacques Tourneur
In the most memorable scene from The Leopard Man, a young girl (Margaret Landry) confronts and is brutally mauled by a black panther. The sequence plays out with a thick level of paranoia–the girl has heard stories of the loose animal, and has even been teased by her family that it is not something that should concern her. When she meets a railroad overpass, she hesitates for an inordinate amount of time, looking behind her and back towards the darkness, slowly succumbing to its pull. In the way that the girl has the foresight to know the dangers that might lurk beneath and finding herself unable to resist confronting her fears and crossing anyway, the moment is evocative of everything that makes Val Lewton’s films remarkable. She is not ambivalent towards death, but she is seduced by it. And, although little more is seen of the actual cat than what a young boy has shadow puppeteered on a wall (a black figure, a symbol of death), the use of sound and shadows evokes unspeakable horrors. If The Leopard Man doesn’t quite live up to director Jacques Tourneur’s masterpieces with Lewton (Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie), it is not far behind. The narrative is loosely structured around a series of killings as if in a slasher film, but Tourneur’s transitions and handling of the material is remarkable. Before the story shifts to the young girl running groceries, Tourneur’s camera has followed a local dancer (Margo) walking down a street, her castanets echoing through the girl’s home. Their interconnectedness points to the screenplay’s fascination with a sense of fatalism, echoed most blatantly as characters ponder a ball bouncing on top of a fountain as a metaphor for man’s obliviousness towards the forces that pull them.
Director: Jacques Tourneur
A quintessential film noir from the director and cinematographer of Cat People, Out of the Past carries a particular type of cynicism that had become especially prominent in American filmmaking during the post-war years. In the opening moments, an idyllic small town is introduced, and within minutes it becomes infiltrated by a crude man with a questionable agenda. The wholesome suburban life that was often reflected in the late 1940s and 1950s is up-rooted by the man’s presence, who has literally come to destroy the facade for our protagonist. He, Robert Mitchum, will most certainly not go down easy. Daniel Mainwaring’s script, adapted from his own novel Build My Gallows High, is packed with crackling dialogue, perfectly suited to Mitchum’s imposing yet alluring figure. Late in the picture, Mitchum tells the femme fatale, played by an unforgettable Jane Greer, that they’re both no good and that they deserve each other. In doing so, he is underselling himself and the relationship that he has developed with an agreeable local girl played by Virginia Huston. Haunted by his past, however, with a permanence that he has fully resigned himself to, he must give up respectable living for the reckless toil of a life of crime and double-crosses. It is fitting that a picture that so skewers domestic stability came just after the second World War. Much like Mitchum’s character, men who suffered trauma on the battlefield had a difficult time assimilating back into home living, and as such the hero with a troubled past reflects the inability of war veterans to simply “begin again” on the homefront.
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