Well, for the most part, anyway. In a rural part of New Mexico, actress Kiki Walker is competing for attention with a local castanets dancer. Kiki's manager brings her a leopard on a leash so she can show the dancer up during her performance. Her rival one-ups her by snapping the castanets right in the leopard's face, which drives it wild. It breaks free from its mistress' grasp. As it flees from the night club, a waiter raises his hand: three bloody claw-marks from trying to stop the wild beast. The meat of the film is made up mostly from three tragedies resulting from the leopard - or do they? Okay, so the "or do they?" part isn't great, but those three tragedies are three of the best sequences in film history, no doubt. The first concerns a young girl forced by her mother to buy cornmeal in the middle of the night. Her younger brother meanly teases her by making leopard-shaped shadow puppets on the wall. The second involves a young girl who has gone to the graveyard to put flowers on her mother's grave, and also to meet with her lover. When she doesn't find him there, she becomes depressed and doesn't hear the groundskeeper's warning that he is locking the gate. The third happens to the castanet player, whose fortune teller turns up the ace of spades for her several times in a row without fail. An expert expresses the belief that the leopard could not have caused all of these events, so the film becomes, unfortunately, a whodunit. The answer is obvious immediately, even if it's not believable. Fortunately, the direction is so excellent, as well as the set pieces, that even with such a weak solution, the film is a near-masterpiece. 9/10.
Review of The Leopard Man
