Everyone's got a "black alibi" in the Lewtonest of Val Lewton scare flicks THE LEOPARD MAN, on Blu-ray from Scream Factory.

Touring New Mexico with nightclub performer Kiki (Jean Brooks, THE SEVENTH VICTIM), publicist Jerry Manning (Dennis O'Keefe, BREWSTER'S MILLIONS) hits upon a way to upstage rival castanet dancer Clo-Clo (Margo, LOST HORIZON) by making an entrance with a black leopard on a leash. Clo-Clo's castanets, however, frighten the animal and its gets loose into the town. A search party is unable to find it before it murders poor Teresita (Margaret Landry) whose mother sent her out in the dead of night to get cornmeal. Although an inquest determines that Jerry is not legally responsible for the tragedy, he feels guilty although it he tries to hide it behind indifference. When heiress Conseulo (Tuulikki Paananen, STOLEN DEATH) goes to meet her lover Raoul (Richard Martin, DYNAMITE PASS) and is trapped in the cemetery where she is discovered torn to shreds the next day, Jerry starts to suspect that the culprit might not be the animal but a man with "kinks in the brain," especially after museum curator/zoologist Galbraith (James Bell, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE) tells him that a wild animal like a leopard would more likely head for open country than hide and prowl in town. Upon hearing the theory, the animal's owner Charlie How-Come (Abner Biberman, HIS GIRL FRIDAY) fears that he may be responsible while under the influence of alcohol, but the sheriff (Ben Bard, THE BAT WHISPERS) continues to focus on finding the animal. Meanwhile, Clo-Clo starts to suspect that she may be the next victim when a local card reader predicts that she will receive a lot of money from an elderly man right before something black comes for her.

An adaptation of Cornell Woolrich's novel "Black Alibi" about a killer whose crimes are blamed on an escaped jaguar, THE LEOPARD MAN was producer Val Lewton's and director Jacques Tourneur's follow-up to the superior CAT PEOPLE and I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE. While the earlier films had stories spiked by striking and suspenseful stalking set-pieces, THE LEOPARD MAN is constructed entirely around a series of set-pieces with the "Lewton Bus" now a train and the photography of Robert De Grasse (THE BODY SNATCHER) suitably noir-ish but somehow not as intoxicating as the work of Nicholas Musuraca on the earlier Tourneur film. While the film is suitably entertaining in spite of its odd structure, the romantic leads are uninteresting, and the identity of the culprit as obvious as the red herrings. The film's editor Mark Robson (CITIZEN KANE) would helm four of the subsequent Lewton horrors including the masterful THE SEVENTH VICTIM and ISLE OF THE DEAD, the latter scripted by THE LEOPARD MAN scripter Ardel Wray.

Released theatrically by RKO and reissued by them in the 1950s, THE LEOPARD MAN was issued on VHS by Media Home Entertainment offshoot The Nostalgia Merchant in the 1980s followed by a Turner VHS and Image laserdisc in 1991 and a remastered laserdisc as part of Image's six-disc THE VAL LEWTON COLLECTION. The film made its DVD debut double-billed with THE GHOST SHIP as part of the five-disc VAL LEWTON HORROR COLLECTION in 2005 and the six-disc 2008 reissue which added the documentary VAL LEWTON: THE MAN IN THE SHADOWS. Scream Factory's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.33:1 pillarboxed fullscreen Blu-ray comes from a 4K scan of the original camera negative sporting the inkiest blacks, skintones somewhere in the grayscale, and some striking use of bright whites including what seems like a pair of cat's eyes staring out at the ill-fated girl in the darkness beneath a train bridge. The English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track boasts clear dialogue, music, and effects – never have the sound of castanets been so nerve-wracking – with the track clean enough to suit the trademark use of silence during suspense scenes in Lewton films. Optional English SDH subtitles are included that have a couple typos.