Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

alienation mixed with nuanced performances and its evocative, restless atmosphere, along
with its visual sense, make this film come very close to the patterns of film noir.
A clear indication of the affinity between horror and film noir is a third Lewton
film, adapted from the hard-boiled writer Cornell Woolrich’s novel Black Alibi. Billed as a
horror movie 39 also directed by Jacques Tourneur, The Leopard Man (1943) is set in a New
Mexico town, where press agent Jerry Manning (Denis O’Keefe) and his girlfriend
nightclub performer Kiki Walker (Jean Brooks) try to attract some publicity to their club
by hiring a stunt black leopard (fig. 31). 40 Jealous and feeling that she is being upstaged,
Figure 31. The Leopard Man
Clo-Clo (Margo), her rival, frightens the animal and it escapes into the dark night desert.
The film then revolves round a series of murders (four women) after the leopard’s
disappearance, with Manning and his girlfriend (who are now accused of and held
responsible for these atrocities in town) trying to seek out the giant cat. After all these
killings, Jerry becomes suspicious that this slaughter is not actually carried out by the
leopard, and thereafter starts playing the role of the detective. In the end, the local museum
curator is unmasked as the killer. The Tourneur / Lewton films use animalistic terror to
unlock the unconscious of their protagonists and question the nature of perception and the
processes of reasoning. J.P. Telotte also states that their films highlighted “the dreamlike
qualities of experience, the powers of myth and psychic fantasies and the constant threat of
39
The Leopard Man is in fact as much a suspenseful little murder mystery as a horror film.
40
The same black leopard (named “Dynamite”) which was used in Cat People (1942) and brought back for
this film.
129