On Blu-ray - David Hare praises a new edition of THE LEOPARD MAN (Jacques Tourneur, USA, 1943)

Margo (above, click to enlarge) as "Clo Clo" the New Mexico niteclub dancer in Tourneur's wonderful The Leopard Man (1943). From the new Shout Factory/Warner Blu-ray. 

As is so often the case in Tourneur, a major musical number signals the first intimation of meaning and mystery in the narrative. Like the Zombie healing ritual ceremony in I Walked with a Zombie, or the dusk campfire sequence from Way of a Gaucho in which Rory Calhoun and Gene Tierney fall in love before our eyes in ten wordless minutes backed only with shadows cast around the bonfire and passionately sung music.

This newly minted and sourced image for Leopard Man was harvested from a much battered O-Neg and several other elements in 4K workflow and finally delivers a superb visual and audio quality to what was previously the very worst presented title in the now fifteen-year old Warner's Lewton boxset from 2005. The film is now completely revelatory in this presentation and feels like a new experience. 

This leaves five more Lewton titles still to go, with Robson's The Seventh Victim and Tourneur's sublime I Walked with a Zombie as the outright high points.

As the beautifully rendered image quality on this disc attests, Tourneur was a master of extracting maximum impact from modest, even humble production resources, upon which he focusses his gaze with the intensity of a deeply powerful auteur. One whose gaze rests on the unknowable mysteries of human behavior and the nature of evil. 

Leopard Man has one of the most felicitous female casts in all Tourneur, including Jean Brooks (the fallen sister from The Seventh Victim) as Kiki, Isabell Jewell as the Fortune Teller, and Margaret Landry as the "innocent" Teresa who's ruthlessly killed at her own doorstep. The males in the picture including the unlikeable lead, Dennis O'Keefe wander through the picture like lost souls, with James Bell who played the Doctor in Zombie, here playing another powerless authority figure who has clearly given up on the human condition and its evils in this Cornell Woolrich based screnplay from Ardel Wray.

Apparently Shout Factory recorded fairly dismal sales for the previous Lewton release in this series, Robert Wise's The Body Snatcher, which may spell imperilment for the release of the remaining titles in the Lewton series which, I understand have all been rescued and restored at Warner's MPI facility.

The Lewton films are the very sort of thing fucking Criterion should have been at least considering for its number 1000 title. Instead we get a ten-thousand disc deluxe gilt edged bank-breaking boxset of Godzillas from 54 to 77 as the grand celebration of cinema from this once estimable label. Criterion for all its formerly good work, these days resembles more a wallpaper factory for millenial film college students with its continuous repertoire of often needless reissues of new 4Ks which are already out there anyway for collectors in other regions or territories. Meanwhile strapped outfits like Kino-Lorber, or Arrow, or Indicator/Powerhouse keep producing the goods in spades from deep and crucial catalogue with joyous abandon.