Customer Reviews

The Leopard Man & The Ghost Ship

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Ghost Ship was even produced because RKO Studio spent a bundle on a ship set for the 1938 A-list flop, Pacific Liner. Since they already had an expensive ship set laying around, they tasked producer Val Lewton to "make use of it"... The film, The Ghost Ship, was the result. Unfortunately, like the crew of the Altair, the film was itself doomed.

I consider this film "right up there" - indeed even surpassing, the producer's other great noir-style psychological "horror" works. It has been largely forgotten for two reasons. First, it was not directed by Jacques Tourner. Rather, it was deftly directed by Mark Robson. Secondly, and more importantly, RKO and Val Lewton pulled it out of release for 50 years after losing a $25,000 lawsuit to playrights Samuel R. Golding and Norbert Faulkner who claimed that the film was based on their unproduced play, "The Man and His Shadow", which they submitted to Lewton for consideration as a possible film.

Thematically, the film reminds me - somewhat, of Heart of Darkness due to its foggy settings and rich visual "black and white" (as opposed to Conrad's written use of these terms as a motif throughout Hear of Darkness) noir-style cinematography with Captain, Will Stone (beautifully portrayed by Richard Dix), like Conrad's Kurtz, having some "issues" handling authority.

Bottom like - "lesser known" (due to its fairly recent re-emergence after 50 years) but certainly not "lesser" Lewton. The Ghost Ship is a tremendous B film, slipping a smart and sumptuously crafted psychological thriller in the "b-horror" space, that genuinely keeps you engaged and guessing throughout, as you slip into its sumptuous, dreamy, foggy pools of black.

"The Leopard Man"

All or our lives are like the ball bouncing at the top of the fountain

Rival entertainers meet in a club in New Mexico Kiki Walker (Jean Brooks) brings in a leopard to upstage Clo-Clo (Margo). But Clo-Clo gets the last laugh when she chases the leopard off with her castanets.

All is fun rivalry until people start dying. Naturally the local authorities think it is the leopard. But Jerry Manning (Dennis O'Keefe) who rented the leopard has a theory that this is the work of a demented person. This theory is sort of supported by Dr. Galbraith (James Bell) the local museum curator. To make matters worse the leopard's owner, Charlie How-Come (Abner Biberman) does not remember where he was at the time.

As with the cat people it is what you don't see that can harm you. And the simile turning of a card can mark you for death.

You may recognize Dynamite the leopard that was also used in the movie "Cat People".

Produced by Val Lewton (7 May 1904, Yalta, Crimea, Russian Empire (now Ukraine) ) whose story telling device is unique in that this is more of a psychological film that does not focus on any one person as they are all pawns in a much larger story. Some time it verges on the surreal.

Now that you have seen the film read the book "Black Alibi" by Cornell Woolrich.
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"The Ghost Ship"

A new third mate on his first long sea voyage in introduced to captain and crew. Before he steps on bard he is warned by a blond man. He runs into a mute. And before they even leave port Jensen is found dead, just a heat attack. "With his death the waters of the sea are open to us. But there will be other deaths and the agony of dieing."

Don't go looking for anything supernatural as this is a Val Lewton movie. I would pay close attention to the characters. One of them may be a bit unhinged. The big question in this story is man's nature to help or ignore their fellow man.

The Val Lewton Horror Collection (Cat People / The Curse of the Cat People / I Walked with a Zombie / The Body Snatcher / Isle of the Dead / Bedlam / The Leopard Man / The Ghost Ship / The Seventh Victim / Shadows in the Dark)

THE GHOST SHIP and THE LEOPARD MAN are both black and white films of a little more than an hour in length that were produced by Val Lewton in the 1940's. Despite the horror movie titles THE GHOST SHIP has no ghosts and THE LEOPARD MAN contains no supernatural elements.

The setting of THE LEOPARD MAN is New Mexico presumably in the 1940's when the film was made. A leopard escapes and three young women are stalked and found dead. At first it is assumed the leopard is responsible or could it be someone or something else? The film makes good use of the New Mexico setting and its blend of Native American, Mexican American and Anglo traditions. And somehow in a little more than an hour we are fully introduced to all three of the victims and meet their families and learn quite a bit about them so we are quite moved by their deaths. The movie has some subtle horrific touches - look for the chilling use of shadow puppets by the first victim's brother both before and after his sister's death. An interesting film but more of a murder mystery than pure horror.

THE GHOST SHIP is pure psychological suspense. A young ship officer signs on to a ship with a captain who has some very dangerous ideas about authority. Suspicious deaths follow and the film takes on a genuine nightmarish quality as the young officer tried to expose the increasingly unstable captain. A decent storyline that would feel right at home on THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

Proto-THE CAINE MUTINY tale that I like more the more I think about it. The momentum of Wade realizing that Dix is nutso is broken by the introduction of Edith Barrett as Dix's long-time love. But it serves to humanize his character and show the audience that he *knows* he's going mad and is helpless to prevent it. The scenes w/ the swinging grappling hook and Lawrence Tierney being crushed by the anchor chain are well-done, but my favorite was the jarringly (for 1943) violent and bloody knife fight at the end. Dix's pudginess and vague air of dissoluteness really works here and is a lot more subtle than Bogie's Queeg. 7/10

A lot of great individual scenes: a teenaged girl being attacked by a leopard outside her home as her mother tries to unbolt the door, ending with her blood seeping through to the kitchen, is a standout. The way the action follows one character & then another & then another is interesting, too. But in the end this is 2nd-tier Lewton; the leads are bland & distasteful, and the psycho is dull. 6/10

THE LEOPARD MAN is an excellent "B" horror mystery from the great filmmaker Val Lewton here adapting a novel by the equally magnificently macabre Cornell Woolrich ("Black Alibi"). These titans of tension team for one of the greatest films where the horror is more emotional tension than seen violence.

In a modest border town nightclub, a panther is brought into an entertainer's act but the animal gets away during a performance and soon blood and bodies are turning up, terrifying the locals. The panther owner insists his animal wouldn't attack but still....

This movie brilliantly tackles primal fears from common (walking home on darkened streets at night) to exotic (being locked in a gated cemetery at night) with side glances to everything from shadows on the wall to reading of fortune cards to dusty museums. And then their is the rattlesnake-like click of the castanets to add ominous audio to the well-stocked supply of visual terrors. The cinematography is superb, foreshadowing film noir in it's use of lighting as drama.

The Margaret Landry sequence as the girl sent out in the dead of night for cornmeal is surely one of the greatest, most imitated and most heralded sequences in B movie history. To be fully appreciated, it must be seen with little advance data so again please avoid reading too much about the film on the net before viewing THE LEOPARD MAN to receive the full impact of the film. While made on a fairly modest budget, this is film-making done by masters.

GHOST SHIP - This was pretty good entry in the Val Lewton Horror Collection, even though it's anything but "horror." This film is a straight drama, almost a film noir about a paranoid sea captain (Richard Dix) who eliminates anyone who disagrees with his "authority," a key word in this movie.

Russell Wade is the captain's protégé, and the story really centers around him and the conflict he has with his boss after he begins to find out what a violent nutcase he happens to be. Along the way, it was noteworthy to see Lawrence Tierney play one of the captain's victims.

Also good was Jacob "Sparks" Winslow as the ship's radio operator. This is an involving film as we root for Wade to expose this captain and to convince others that the man with the "authority" is an evil person.

THE LEOPARD MAN - I first saw this movie in the mid '90s, was not that impressed, but gave it another look when I acquired the Lewton set. On the second viewing..... I still wasn't impressed.

After a great start, with an extremely suspenseful scene with a woman outdoors alone on a dark street with a panther loose, the film bogs down big-time....down to a crawl at times. If only the second half had kept that early momentum up.

There are a lot of nighttime scenes, as was the case with a lot of Lewton's atmospheric films.

IF YOU LOVE VAL LEWTONS MOVIES THEN GET THIS DVD I ENJOYED BOTH MOVIES. "The Leopard Man " HAD ALL THE DARKNESS OF THE CAT PEOPLE.
IN "The Ghost Ship" WE WERE REUNITED WITH A FEW PEOPLE AND PLACES FROM "I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE" VERY NICE TOUCH. THE SKIPPER OF THE SHIP WAS AN ODD FISH, STILL I ENJOYED BOTH.

I own the val lewton collection set. However these movies are not out-of print you could buy the whole box set for the price theses sellers are selling these movies indvidually for from the box set........Highly recommend but beware buy the box set.............Great film very sad and artistic.

The Leopard Man:
Sure, The Leopard Man is a cheap B movie, fodder for all those double bills during the Forties, but I like it a lot. It only runs 66 minutes and it packs a lot of craftsmanship into that time. What seems unusual to me is that the film, made to be filled with dread and to be a little scary, is also filled with sadness of a sort. This doesn't change its B movie status, but for me it gives the movie more depth than I expected.

Jerry Manning (Dennis O'Keefe), a promoter and boy friend of Kiki Walker (Jean Brooks), a performer at a nightclub in a small New Mexico town, rents a black leopard as an attention-getting gimmick for Kiki. She makes an entrance during the performance of a rival, Clo-Clo (Margo), a castanet-clicking dancer. But Clo-Clo isn't intimidated. When she advances on the leopard clicking her castanets, the leopard pulls free and dashes out of the open-air dance floor. Hours later, a young girl is found, slashed and mauled. Then another. Then another. Could all this be the work of the leopard...or of a psychotic individual pushed over the edge by opportunity and lust? Jerry Manning, a tough guy who thought he'd come up with a great stunt, finds himself wracked with guilt. The police don't believe him when he says the leopard couldn't have killed all three girls, so he and Kiki set out on their own to find the killer.

The craftsmanship is evident quickly. Within the first six minutes we've learned all we need to know about the set up. We've also met almost all the main characters. We're brought quickly into the horror with the first death. The atmosphere is established with all those dark, dark streets, hidden doorways and, with Clo-Clo, the sound of her castanets that she clicks and trills wherever she walks.

What I thought was unusual is that Tourneur took the time to let us get to know the three victims. The first is just a young girl from a poor family, perhaps 15 or 16, sent out by her mother to buy a sack of cornmeal so the mother can make tortillas for the evening meal. It's already dark, the mother is working hard and hasn't the time to indulge her daughter, who is reluctant to go. We see the girl try to get a nearby shop-owner to open the store, and when she's refused she has to set out for a larger store further away. We see her talk to the kindly owner, play briefly with a bird, and then set out fearfully on the long walk home. Then we're back at the house. The mother is working at the stove. She hears pounding on the locked door and pleas from her daughter to let her in. Then we see blood slowly pooling under the door. It's a vivid, startling sequence. With the next victim, 17 or 18 and from a wealthy family, we've watched the girl awaken to her birthday, shared with her a note from her boyfriend, shared her excitement at the prospect of an innocent and exciting tryst at a cemetery. But she just misses her boyfriend, it gets dark, she's locked in as the moon comes out. And soon she hears rustling in the trees. The third victim is a woman we've come to like. She's afraid of no one. She makes her own way. And then we learn she has a small child and a man she hopes to marry. She loses some money on a dark, lonely street and feels she must go back to find it. These were three people Tourneur managed to give personalities to.

"What sort of man would kill like a leopard and leave traces of a leopard..." says one character. When we find out, we're still a bit saddened. This was no raving monster with steel claws taped to his hands, just a quiet guy who was the victim of his nature and his obsessions.

Dennis O'Keefe had a long run in the movies but died fairly young. He had bit parts in hundreds of films before he started to get major roles. I've always liked him. He had an easy going personality, and could play farce (Getting Gertie's Garter, Brewster's Millions) as easily as he could play tough guys (Raw Deal, T Men). He does a fine job in a movie he co-wrote, Cover-Up.

The movie shares a disc with another Val Lewton-produced quickie, The Ghost Ship. The DVD transfer looks fine. There is a commentary track I didn't listen to.

The Ghost Ship:
This Val Lewton-produced quickie is a typical double-feature programmer from the Forties. It's the story of a mad sea captain, Will Stone (Richard Dix) who has become fixated on doing away with his young third officer, Tom Merriman (Russell Wade). Most of the action takes place on ship as Merriman tries to convince the crew that the captain is mad. They don't believe him, so Merriman must use his wits just to survive. There is no style to the movie and the acting is just passable. Dix, a long-time reliable and popular leading man, manages not to embarrass himself. He let's us see the madness very gradually.

The standout, as far as I'm concerned, is the actor who plays the deaf-mute seaman...who narrates the movie. Skelton Knaggs was a slight man with a startlingly sinister face. You'll remember him once you've seen him. In this movie, he likes to sharpen large knives.

The DVD transfer looks fine. There are no extras.