The Films of Val Lewton - Part Eight

The Leopard Man - part three


Clo-Clo is making her way to the nightclub, the closed off and exclusive world from which the leopard has initially been loosed on the town outside. This time it is the walled enclosure which offers the warm buzz of life as opposed to the dark and deathly streets outside. This arena dedicated to the pleasure of wealthy visitors is carefully insulated from the tribulations of the world beyond its walls. Here we find a table with a trio of American tourists, one of whom is loudly complaining about the service. The rich older man is ignored by his companions (his daughter and her fiancé). As with Kiki and the cigarette girl, there is the constant fear of obsolescence, of being superseded by a new generation eager to usurp your position and assume control. He drifts over to where Clo-Clo is sitting and they engage in knowing banter. An element of honesty soon enters the conversation and they clearly enjoy each other’s company. They reject champagne, the symbol of conspicuous wealth, in favour of beer. Clo-Clo, with a hint of righteous anger, defiantly admits to being a gold-digger, and in response to the old man’s questioning as to whether she really knows what she wants states the importance of money to those who don’t have it. It is for ‘Mama and the kids and the unpaid bills and the rent’; A selfless desire for wealth, then, beyond mere self-indulgence. Drawn out by the old man’s evident kindness (foolishness in the hard eyes of his daughter) she admits to her feelings for Carlos Dominguez, a boy who works in the grocery store, but economic factors loom large for her here too. ‘Feelings don’t buy houses and pay for the rent and help bring up kids and get clothes for them’. They both laugh at the uninhibited articulation of such underlying inequalities which are normally smoothed away in this controlled environment. It is a suspension of the required civilities occasioned by the ease and understanding which has instantly sprung up between them (Clo-Clo has asked him why he allows his daughter to treat him with such contempt). When she leaves, it is with a hundred dollar bill in her hand. It is an exchange which has been made in a genuine spirit of generosity (because he can and because he likes her) and leaves her feeling elated rather than cheap and used.

Clo-Clo sets out on her walk home in high spirits, castanet clicks echoing in empty streets. But she stops off to see the gypsy woman on the way and is filled with doubt as a result. The king of spades is drawn, betokening ‘something black coming your way’, followed once more by the death card. Whereas Clo-Clo has shrugged the doom –filled readings off in the past, it as if, now she has something to lose, she has become much more vulnerable to the suggestion of ill-fortune in her future. Her cheer has swiftly dissipated and the night suddenly seems ominous and threatening. Her spirits have previously seemed to transform her surroundings to conform with her vitality, but now she herself is overwhelmed by the palpable atmosphere of menace and dark foreboding. She gets the gypsy woman to walk with her awhile, towering over her until they part company and she steps from the kerb, reducing her to an equivalent height, cutting her down to size. The night walk home is solitary now; there are no cheery greetings or exchanges of gossip. She has an offer of a lift, but turns it down because the car is black. Superstition leads to such random choices which can actually lead a person to the fate which they seek to avoid.

Clo-Clo makes it back home and greets her little ‘Pepita’, promising her a beautiful dress. This is the first time we’ve seen Clo-Clo in her domestic environment and it fundamentally alters our view of her as another competitive showbiz ‘player’ looking out for her own interests. Her mother comes down the stairs to complete the picture of this female environment. The three aspects of the old goddess are all here – girl, woman and ‘crone’. But this is the modern world, and this old triumvirate is confined to the interior domestic world, shut-in and hidden. The outside world is reliant on economic exchange and Clo-Clo discovers that the money which she tucked into her stocking is gone. She must go back out. In the exterior darkness she hears someone approaching and chooses to believe that it is Carlos. It is a choice to believe in life rather than to fear death. Sadly, it is not a belief which is borne out on this occasion. The camera focuses on her cigarette on the ground as she dies, its flickering embers representing the last of the dying light.

Kiki and Jerry are preparing to make a tactical retreat and leave for Chicago, leaving the mess they have created behind them. The cigarette girl tells them about the annual parade which is due to take place. She also relates her own dreams of escape, an individualist dream which has no time for local community and which she believes Jerry and Kiki to have achieved. A dream of going to Chicago and New York and of ‘being somebody – an entertainer’. A rather hollow ambition which serves to stand in for the competitive ethic of America as a whole, which serves to set people against each other. The dream of making it big in the city indicates the way in which the aspirations of American culture have been overlaid on communities which they unbalance and distort as a result. In the car in which they are driving away, Kiki decides to break their journey in order to take the flowers which Galbraith has given them to Consuela’s grave. Again, flowers end up symbolising death, in contradiction of their original intention. The graveyard proves to be the arena for mutual confession and for a rejection of the aloof isolationism which has been gradually eroded away throughout the film. The break in their journey becomes permanent. ‘We’ve been so busy trying to be tough guys’, says Kiki. ‘Maybe I’m tired of pretending that nothing bothers me, that all I care about is myself and my 2 by 4 career’. They determine to stay and solve the problems which they have set in motion, although with limited resources at their disposal, as it turns out that they have both given away most of their money to help the families of Theresa and Clo-Clo. This reduction of wealth further serves to level them with the community with which they have chosen to identify themselves. They are no longer intervening from a position of economic superiority, imposing their worldview from above.

As they leave the graveyard, they have an exchange with the gatekeeper, who confides that ‘I have many friends, but they don’t bother me with talk’. He is the keeper of the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead. They meet Charlie, who has the body of his leopard (and demands economic recompense) which has been lying in the wilderness for some time. It becomes evident that it was Galbraith, who left the main body of the posse at some point, who shot it and failed to inform anyone. Jerry follows up on their avowal to get involved and goes to visit Raul, whom he wrests away from his retreat into the bottle. By the time they leave his room, Raul is having one last swig, but this time it’s for courage.

The final scenes take place as the annual procession makes its sombre progress, Inquisitorial figures holding candles before them and intoning what sounds more like Russian Orthodox chant than the traditional liturgical forms of Catholicism. Galbraith explains the procession to the cigarette girl, who has seemingly also been drawn into Jerry and Kiki’s grand plan which now begins to unfold. It is ‘so that they won’t ever forget that a peaceful village of Indians was wiped out by the Conquistadores back in the 17th century. A band of monks buried the dead, prayed for them and did penance for their deaths’. The procession is a continuation of that penance. The cigarette girl has been primed to draw this information out of Galbraith not only to inform us of the ceremonial significance of the parade, but to underline it for him and bring it to the forefront of his consciousness. His personal guilt is directly linked with this historical guilt and the prompting of his reiteration of the story behind the procession is the first step in a series of taunts to his psyche designed to bring about a mental collapse and confession. If the atrocities of the Conquistadores play on feelings of ancestral guilt then the voice from the graveyard and the cigarette and castanets on the ground remind him of direct personal guilt. Spectres ancient and modern are conjured to haunt his conscience.

Galbraith retreats to the ossified past of his museum, a place where history is no longer a living thing but a collection of relics from a dead culture, neatly categorised, labelled and stored away. Kiki comes into the museum to block this anticipated avenue of retreat, claiming that she has come to see the procession. Galbraith nervously says ‘they’ll just be shadows’, as if trying to dispel the potency of the forces at work in him. But Kiki continues the conjuration of his subconscious demons, announcing ‘they’re coming now’ and insistently suggesting that they turn the lights out. She is goading him into revealing the darkness in his soul and when she drops the castanets she has up her sleeve, he realises who has been behind the ‘hauntings’ which have driven him to take refuge here. He knows that she knows what he’s done. She knows that he knows she knows. He moves to attack her. At the cue of her scream Jerry and Raul burst in and in the ensuing confusion Galbraith manages to run outside.

His flight takes him straight into the procession, where he is soon joined by Jerry and Raul. They all fall in step and are all effectively confessing and doing penance for their collective guilt. The three men, two American and one Spanish. Charlie the Indian has spent his night in prison and his innocence has been proven by the murder which took place during his residency. Kiki remains back in the museum. The low bass voices of the processors emphasise that this is a male affair. Galbraith has directed his rage against women and now joins a ceremony which is a display of Catholicism in the raw. We’ve already seen hints of older religions and traditions in which women played a stronger role; the hints of Greek influence in the graveyard, including the shrine which resembles the opening of an oracle; Clo-Clo’s female household which contains the three aspects of the goddess as represented by the Fates in Greek mythology; the gypsy woman’s pagan Madonna and card oracle. There is also the Indian woman who we have glimpsed spinning outside the museum in another echo of the Fates. At the end of the film Kiki has drawn out Galbraith’s darkness, made manifest his male violence, buried beneath a mild-mannered exterior. Is it too fanciful to see the Catholic procession as an embodiment of the expunging of female power, of the elevated position of women in pre-Christian pagan religions and cultures? Galbraith, with his total immersion in the past, has become infected with this will to power and domination. We have already seen the juxtaposition of religious traditions in I Walked With A Zombie, and the clash of the modern catechisms of rationalism with ancient beliefs in Cat People. Religion will continue to occupy a central position in Lewton’s films, from the diabolists of The Seventh Victim, through the revival of Greek traditions in Isle of the Dead, to the Quaker non-conformism of Bedlam.

When he is finally cornered (by a withered tree, another pagan symbol absorbed into the iconography of the cross) Galbraith confesses and tells how the sight of Theresa’s body had haunted him and twisted something in his mind. He had come across Consuela by chance as he passed the graveyard and felt his compulsion to kill awakened by her evident vulnerability. This will to dominate and take advantage of other’s weakness is an extreme version of the relationships we witnessed at the beginning of the film, when the cigarette girl was picking up on any sign that Kiki might be faltering, all too willing to step into her shoes at a moment’s notice (and remember Kiki’s comment about her trying on her coffin). But these two rivals have teamed up in the end, taking part in a group effort to catch the killer. They have in effect formed a miniature community of disparate types. This contrasts starkly with the isolated figure of Galbraith, a man very much alone. The danger of isolating oneself from the community of others is a recurrent theme in Lewton’s films, and particularly comes to the fore in The Ghost Ship.

Raul shoots Galbraith beneath the tree. But it is as if this is what Galbraith has been seeking. He has been drawn into the darkness by witnessing violent death. This has forced him out of his retreat into the empty spaces of the museum in which he has sought a cold comfort, a place where, like the graveyard gatekeeper, he has communion only with the taciturn spirits of the dead. Even before the shock of the sight of Theresa’s body shakes his mind into a new and distorted configuration, he has been half in love with the stasis of death. In Cat People, the leopard was released at the end of the film, whereas here it is released right at the beginning. Irena was aware of her nature, which it was made evident during the film was a genuine manifestation of the supernatural. Her preoccupation was to use that self-awareness of the darkness inside her to make sure that it didn’t emerge into the light of day and cause harm to others. In The Leopard Man, the beast is set loose right from the start, and is a manifestation both of the careless abuse of power deriving from personal ambition and of the dark death-drive within Galbraith. He may not literally turn into a leopard, but the effect is the same. Unlike Irena, he refuses to recognise this side of himself and so has no control over his actions. He strikes us as an emotionally distant man, someone disconnected from his own feelings; A stranger to himself. Jerry and his ‘team’ force him to confront his nature in the end, and in doing so also to reveal their own hidden selves.

In the final scene, Jerry and Kiki find themselves outside the funeral parlour again. This would seem to be a central location in this small town, a place where people regularly gather. Recalling their first visit there, Kiki tells Jerry ‘I hated you that day, you and your flip talk’. But she has discovered that ‘you are soft inside where it counts’, as indeed has Jerry himself. This softness, traditionally seen as a feminine virtue, is seen as the quality which has redeemed Jerry. It’s the quality which nurtures a sense of empathy and in turn of community, of caring about the people around you. Jerry recalls Gabraith’s interpretation of the symbolic nature of the fountain, of how he said that people ‘get pushed around by things bigger than themselves’. He indulges in a little analysis himself: ‘that’s the way it was with us. Only we were too small to see it that way’. They were pushed around by the entirely un-mysterious whorls and eddies of personal ambition and competitive greed. Now they have connected with something less definable but a great deal grander. They exit down the dark street at a slow pace, the same street which Clo-Clo had owned as she walked along it, her familiarity with its every inhabitant drawing connections and creating a sense of the exchanges and small intimacies of everyday life. These are the buoying forces which keep that small, fragile sphere afloat.

Next...The Seventh Victim, corporate diabolism in the Big rotten Apple

The Film of Val Lewton - Part Seven

The Leopard Man - part two

The film is structured around three deaths. These are occasioned by the search to satisfy three basic human needs: Food, love and money. As ever with Lewton, life carries with it the shadow of death. The Leopard Man illustrates how this can exert an overpowering fascination. The three women who die are at differing stages of life. Theresa Delgado is a young girl, Consuela is just beginning to approach the first bloom of maturity, and Clo-Clo is a mature woman in command of herself and at ease in her surroundings. Women are often presented as victims in horror films, of course, but here you sense that they are symbolic of different aspects of the life force, succumbing to an almost impersonal embodiment of the opposed force of death (Thanatos, as Freud would have it). This is death in a masculine guise and is also representative of historical and religious forces of conquest and the violent imposition of power.

The scene in which Theresa meets her death is perhaps the most celebrated of the film. It is another of Lewton and Tourneur’s sustained exercises in atmosphere. Theresa’s mother sends her daughter out into the night for cornmeal for tortillas out of a sense of pride – she doesn’t want to be seen to poor in front of guests. Theresa’s evident fear is dismissed out of hand. She is too late for the local shop, the proprietor of which refuses to unlock the door for her because it would be too much trouble for her. These are the small gestures creating the forks in the path which determine someone’s fate. If she had taken the trouble to open up the door for her, Theresa wouldn’t have had to continue over the arroyo to the more distant store, as she does. The arroyo itself is an ominous southern gothic landscape, with a dry desert wind blowing through the dark underpass of the concrete railway bridge which spans the dusty gulch. This imposition of the resolutely artificial on the natural is echoed in the store, where Theresa admires the mechanical toy birds in their cage. The storekeeper has evidently known her since she was a little girl, and the sense of community which this once more underlines is furthered by his insistence on giving her credit, since ‘the poor don’t cheat one another; we’re poor together’.

As she makes the trip back through the arroyo and into the dark shadows beneath the bridge, the wind has died down and the sound of water dripping into the narrow channel only serves to amplify the silence. We see the twin points of light which are the leopard’s eyes. The Lewton ‘bus’ on this occasion is a train, which roars overhead, throwing its light onto the concrete in epileptic flashes. Whereas the original ‘bus’ which arrived at the end of the first nightwalk scene in Cat People (see previous post) served both as a mechanical jolt and a signal that the danger was over, here the intrusion of loud modernity into the wilderness serves to frighten the leopard and make it leap into aggressive action. As Charlie had said of his creature in criticising the police tactics of trying to drive it out with noise, ‘they don’t want to hurt you, but if you scare them, they go crazy’. Theresa runs, dropping the cornmeal which spills out onto the ground. We hear her pounding at the door, but her mother won’t let her in, determined to chastise her for taking so long. When we hear the thud of a body against the door and a scream suddenly cut short by animalistic snarls, we know that it is too late. The blood which flows in a stream under the door, echoing the thin trickle of water beneath the bridge, pools and spreads out in the cracks of the floor paving, following a rigorous path as if this has all been pre-determined by fate.



The inquest is held in a glass-fronted showroom on the main street, and we first see the events through this window, which is in the process of being cleaned. The following scene will make the situation more transparent, it is implied. Theresa’ s young brother makes leopard shadows against the wall. Death is simply not a reality for him yet. Kiki gives a contribution for the funeral to a nun who is in attendance. The church as a convenient outlet for the expiation of guilt. Jerry’s solution is also to ‘slip them a few bucks’, an economic reaction to culpability which elides deeper involvement. It is left to Chief Robles to comfort the family. He is like a secular priest, a humane man who cares about the people in his community. Jerry’s lack of involvement is conversely highlighted when he turns down the offer to take part in a posse to hunt for the leopard, making ‘flip talk’, as Kiki will later refer to it, about being a tenderfoot. Chief Robles pointedly tells Gailbraith that ‘no-one blames you’ after his evident distress whilst Jerry is told ‘no one holds you legally responsible’. Merely morally. These judgements will be reversed by the end of the film. As the family walks down the street, Jerry moves aside. He is apart, distanced from the community which is united in mourning.

The next scene juxtaposes the image of the nun from the inquest with a momentarily still tableau of the gypsy fortune teller in Marian pose, head tilted contemplatively to one side, head covered with a veil. The piety of this icon is immediately sullied when she pulls up her everpresent cigarette to her lips. The introduction of such a cheekily profane image makes a point about the way that spiritual solace can be found in the most unlikely of places, however. It is also a reminder that older religious traditions exist from which Catholicism has drawn in order to fulfil the need for a focus of female power. Clo-Clo goes to see the gypsy for more than a mere card reading. Chief Robles is a figure who acts as more than just a police chief. His cells become almost monastic when he admits Charlie to them for the night to allow him to work off what he knows is a baseless feeling of guilt. The fortune teller is a wise woman in proletarian guise. She says that Charlie Howe should be allowed to look for the leopard, since he is an Indian. She believes in the old wisdom, knowledge connected to the landscape and the ancient cultural strata with which it is layered. Of those who have superseded and buried the ancient traditions, she is dismissive; ‘men are all fools – they like to make a big show’. The bad card comes up again in her reading for Clo-Clo, after one which has indicated ‘you will meet a rich man and he will give you money’. ‘For what was I born for if not for money’ Clo-Clo declaims. It will in fact be money for which she dies.

The gypsy passes Jerry as she leaves Clo-Clo’s dressing room and throws him a dirty look. It turns out that he did go on that posse after all, where he met Galbraith (a buried but important plot point). He says that they got on, and right until the end, when he and Kiki are about to leave, he is saying that they must keep in touch with him, suggesting an affinity between the two men (and a shared guilt?) At the ‘supper show’ they meet up with him and learn that he is the curator of the local museum, which has ‘interesting exhibits of Indian arts and crafts’. Galbraith was a teacher of zoology, but gave it up for reasons he leaves unstated. This evasiveness suggests a guarded personality and hits at some kind of breakdown or crisis in his life; Something which has led him to withdraw to this remote town and within himself. He seems hesitant and a little distant, aloof and emotionally disconnected from the life surrounding him. He will remain a mysterious character until the end, to himself as much as anyone. It is his horror at discovering an element of his personality which he is unable to suppress which leads him to do what he does.

The second death in the film is once more preceded by Clo-Clo acting as a linking character, meeting with a servant, Rosita, who is on her way to bring flowers to her mistress, Consuela Contrera. The fact that Clo-Clo cannot even afford one flower acts as a striking contrast with the well-off Contrera household. The interior of the house is grand, with a staircase ascending in a sweeping curve. The roses are laid out on Consuela’s bed for her birthday in a fashion which directly parallels the way in which she’ll lay them out on her father’s grave later on. Once again, the notion that death is a seed contained within birth is put forth. ‘I must go to the graveyard. It’s my birthday’, she says. This is reminiscent of the islanders in ‘I Walked With A Zombie’, who weep at a birth and celebrate at a funeral. Rosita has surreptitiously shown Consuela that she has a letter from her lover, which agrees to an arranged rendezvous in the graveyard. The laying of roses on her father’s grave act as an excuse and makes the equation between love and death, for both of which these flowers are now the symbol.

Having been told by the cemetery gatekeeper of the time at which he will close and lock the doors, Consuela, lays flowers on her father’s grave and talks to him of her lover, Raul. She goes to meet him in mourner’s black, waiting in a grove circled with classical columns. At the centre of such a space, suggestive of ancient sacred traditions, the statue of the Virgin with child appears more like Diana, a goddess embodying female power. Raul has not waited, however, only the butts of his cigarettes indicating his former presence. The cigarette butt on the ground will be echoed in the later scene with Clo-Clo meeting what she momentarily thinks may be her lover. The extinguished butt on the ground is the dying out of the light of hope and life.

Consuela sits disconsolately on one of the benches, lost in a world of her own misery. She misses the closing time and when the bell is rung, is lost amongst the pathways of stone and evergreen shrubbery and locked in. We see the small fire outside the gate, the precious and tenuous flames of life, which contrast with the cold moonlit stone inside. As Consuela runs through the evergreens which seem to form the walls of a maze which actively seeks to misdirect her, she passes a statue of what may be St Peter, but which in this context is more resemblant of Pan. And indeed, he exerts his influence, as Consuela begins to panic. Cultures are layered atop one another, never wholly disconnected from what has come before. Traces of the past will always leach through the surface coating to form a palimpsest of myth and symbol. Consuela also comes across a small recess in the wall, a votary or shrine which, in the shadowed night, looks more like an ancient oracular site, like the mouth of the stone face at Delphi; the dark entrance to a dank underworld. The wind has started to blow, as it did during Theresa’s trek across the arroyo, a sign of the immanence of the uncanny. The landscape itself seems to conspire against her. Consuela momentarily connects with the world of the living beyond the cemetery as a passerby promises to return with a ladder, but she is now shut off from it by a barrier of stone, just as the concrete bridge proved to be a boundary between life and death for Theresa. In that case, a ball of tumbleweed blew past in the wind as if hurrying between worlds. Here, nature becomes animate again, a branch bending down as if the trees are reaching out to grasp her. Her screams end the scene as we are spared the sight of her end.



The police are joined by Jerry and Galbraith at the graveyard where Theresa’s body has been discovered. Jerry is sceptical about the nature of the crime, which is being ascribed to the leopard. Galbraith opines that ‘caged animals are unpredictable. They’re like frustrated human beings’. He draws the link between human and animal nature, and between a nature upon which captivity is imposed and one whose confinement is a more complex and at least partially self-created form of repression. Meanwhile, Charlie has been reduced to hawking charms and miracle potions. As he tells Jerry, ‘I can’t make a buck without my leopard’. Jerry has appropriated the economic basis of his living. The effects of a careless act reverberates way beyond its initial impact. As Chief Robles, the film’s moral voice puts it, ‘people who want publicity and don’t mind how they get it...what agony and sorrow they bring to other people’.

Jerry and Charlie accompany Galbraith to his museum. It is more like a mausoleum. Outside, a woman in traditional Indian costume sits adjacent to a postcard rack weaving on a handloom. The two are implicitly equivalent, objects of local colour for the edification of tourists. The woman stands (or sits) in contrast with Charlie, who with his silver belt buckle and felt hat looks like a much more modern native inhabitant of the New Mexican landscape, influenced by subsequent developments. The visitors’ footsteps echo and voices reverberate in the interior of the museum, merely serving to underline the deathly emptiness of the space. Galbraith talks to Charlie, trying to interest him in his heritage by showing him a ceremonial leopard head, but he doesn’t respond. Galbraith shows them his latest exhibit and relates how he went back after the rest of the team had packed up and gone home and dug it up himself. The whole museum has the air of a solitary pursuit in which no-one else is interested. Jerry is voicing his suspicions that a man carried out the latest killing, and Galbraith deflects suspicion onto Charlie, under the guise of levity. The whole museum, curated by an American, is a testament to the disappearance of a culture and the erosion of self-esteem which has led to such neglect. Galbraith now plays upon this to arouse Charlie’s native self-doubt. He is so appalled by the very thought that such impulses might be present inside him that he demands he be confined to jail, something which Robles is happy to do for him in his ‘clerical’ guise, even while emphasising his utter disbelief that Charlie has anything to do with Consuela’s death.

We see Charlie in jail and then hear Clo-Clo’s castanets once more providing the link between scenes and emphasising the connectivity of characters in this community. Clo-Clo now walks down a very different street to that in which we first saw her, however. It is dark and depopulated, with only the police and some delivery men for her to greet. Once more we witness the effect of Jerry and Kiki’s careless act on the community. It has become a street of fear.

The Films of Val Lewton - Part Six

The Leopard Man (1943)



The Leopard Man is not perhaps one of the most successful of the Val Lewton productions, partly because of the unsympathetic nature of the source material, Cornell Woolrich’s novel Black Alibi. Lewton and his writers had previously been given carte blanche within the confines of the lurid titles provided by RKO production head Charles Koerner. But here they were working from a pre-existing story and there was therefore less leeway to incorporate personal themes and concerns. Nonetheless, they did manage to mould the material into a form which exhibits many of the typical Lewton traits, and whilst it is not as resonant as either Cat People or I Walked With A Zombie, it does further explore some of the thematic elements which those films introduced.

The credits sequence immediately introduces us to the ambience with which the film is imbued; a view of the night street of a small town with the sound of castanets on the soundtrack evolving into a bolero theme. This is the sound of Hollywood exotic, and indeed the camera glides from the dark exterior through a shadowy corridor into a brightly lit dressing room where a dancer practices with her castanets for her nightclub act. This is Clo-Clo, the New Mexican dancer for whom the castanets are a constant accompaniment, always in her hands as if they were a natural extension of her body. They provide a soundtrack for her as she walks along the streets with a confident stride. It is as if she dances through life. Indeed her vitality and ability to incorporate romantic yearning alongside pragmatic realism within an all-inclusive and never cynical worldview make her the central embodiment of vitality and generosity within the film.

In this opening scene, however, we switch to the adjoining dressing room where two American voices disparage this sound, hammering on the wall to try to get her to shut up. One of them, putting on the costume of the cigarette girl, contemptuously says ‘oh, she’s a local’. There is a palpable sense of tension and rivalry in the room. The other woman is Miss ‘Kiki’ Walker, the ‘big star’ at the night club at which we are backstage. Eloise, the cigarette girl with dreams of stardom, makes it quite clear that she is ready and waiting to step into her shoes should she falter at any step. ‘I bet someday you’ll try on my coffin, and I hope it fits you perfect’, Kiki fires off. This rivalry, the sense that you need to be constantly looking over your shoulder, makes the night club a neat microcosm of America as a whole, a walled-off corral within which the values of ruthless individualism, competitive ambition and money predominate. It contrasts diametrically with the feeling of community which exists in the town outside.

The introduction of the leopard, led in by Jerry Manning, Kiki’s ‘good agent and good friend’, is a symbol of the savagery which lies beneath the civilised airs on display here. Indeed, it’s employment as a tool of showbiz rivalry, to upstage and displace Clo-Clo’s more popular ‘local’ act, puts this symbolism to immediate and explicit use. The leopard is an object which will inspire fear and awe, but most importantly attract attention. It is a way for these American outsiders to impose themselves on the local culture, using one of its totemic creatures. As we learn later from Galbraith, the museum curator, the jaguar and cats in general represented for the Indian indigenes ‘a personification of force and violence’. Kiki is clearly nervous about using this tool of aggressive force, but makes her choice. She chooses a black dress over a red one, ‘then I’ll be just like him’ (indicating the leopard), a creature serving its own needs and hungers, at the expense of others if need be.

In the courtyard of the night-club, the camera focuses on the fountain which is at its centre. This is the film’s symbolic object, the equivalent of I Walked With A Zombie’s statue of Saint Sebastian, and as with that meaning-drenched object, it will be used as visual punctuation, reminding us of its various significations. The small white ball balancing miraculously above the tumbling waters suggests the fragility of life and the mysterious forces which drive it. The ball could stand in for the human soul. Galbraith has his own interpretation, describing the fountaining waters which keep the ball dancing as being analogous to the forces which move us without our knowledge. This could be interpreted as referring to the subconscious or to supernatural or spiritual forces – a matter of belief and worldview. The interpretation of symbolism is ultimately a personal matter and may serve to reveal much about the reader. Certainly it gives a retrospective insight into Galbraith’s psyche (or soul, if you will) which at this point is untainted by murder but is evidently inclined towards the introspective.

The original script described Clo-Clo’s night club dance routine as being first seen reflected in the waters of the fountain’s basin, but a tight shooting schedule rendered this shot unfeasibly complex. It’s another indication of the water’s connotation of transience and fragility though. The water could stand in for the shadowy bars cast upon the walls in I Walked With A Zombie, here with its intimation of a reflective just beyond that of surface appearance, peripherally glimpsed through the intuitive lens of subconscious perception. Rather than the visual image, it is the signature sound of Clo-Clo’s castanets heard over the shot of the fountain which draws the parallel between her, the embodiment of life, and the transience of the tumbling waters and their tenuously suspended dancing ball. When she sees the leopard, led in by Kiki with Jerry ushering her on from behind a curtain, she immediately knows what is going on; she can see the calculation behind the act. Her startling of the leopard with her castanets is a confrontation of opposing forces; The castanets, which provide the rhythm for the dance of her life, daring the dark power of destructive chaos to take her on. It proves unequal to the challenge, and the leopard pulls free from Kiki’s grasp and runs into the night. It is significant that it is Jerry who has bought the leopard into play, urging a reluctant Kiki to carry out his plan. If he is indirectly responsible for the first death and Galbraith is culpable for those which follow, then the leopard stands for the loosing of a malevolent male wave of violence upon the female world. Kiki and Jerry have unleashed forces over which they never had real control. A waiter bears the three-furrowed scar of the leopard’s slashing claw, one of the workaday people who have to face the consequences of such casually used power.

The following police search introduces us to Charlie How-Come, ‘The Leopard Man’ from whom Jerry has hired the beast. He is a Native American (an Indian here) and thus adds a third layer of ethnic history to the New Mexican landscape: Indian followed by Spanish followed by American. This layering of histories is an important subtext of the film. The museum is a central thematic locale and is where the climax of the film takes place. The procession which ends the film is also an annual act of expiation, a commemoration of the savage incursions of the Spanish Conquistadores. The massacre of the powerless by those with exponentially superior force is reflected by the events which unfold over the course of the film, set in course and, as we shall see, perpetuated on this occasion by American men.
The scene in which the humane police chief Robles, Charlie and Jerry discuss the leopard hunt is interrupted by the arrival of Clo-Clo, once again heralded by the sound of her castanets, this time with a note of mocking triumphalism as she waves them in Jerry’s face.

We then follow Clo-Clo as she walks along the town street. She is used as a bridging character in several scenes, emphasising the close connections existing within the community. Here she confidently treads the well known pavement, greeting everyone she passes with a personal exchange betokening a knowledge of and interest in their lives. Clo-Clo is something of a dual character, however. A vivid personification of the spirit of life, she also carries with her something of the night; a faint aura of death. The sound of the castanets could be the dry sound of rattling bones, as musically represented by the xylophone in Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre, his portrayal of the dance of death. When she drops in to see the gypsy fortune teller, she has the first of several card readings which draw a concluding ace of spades, ‘the death card’. This, as the gypsy tells her, can mean different things. It does not initially foretell her own death, but she is the connecting figure who seems to identify those who are about to meet their ends, as if she is passing that card on. She is there at the window greeting Theresa Delgado just before she closes it and is told by her mother to go out for cornmeal. She is given a flower by the maid who has just bought them for Consuela Contreras, who will go out to put them on her father’s grave. Finally, the card is not passed on and accurately foretells her own fate.