Video Dispatches: THE LEOPARD MAN & Two De Palmas

Video Dispatches is a regular column covering recent home video releases.

The Leopard Man (1943) – Shout! Factory

In an essay on Jacques Tourneur that appears in his 1976 collection, “Personal Views”, Robin Wood calls The Leopard Man “notably inferior” to Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie due to being “over-explicit and under-developed,” though it shares many of the same qualities of the others. Revisiting it on Scream Factory’s new Blu-ray, which boasts a new 4k scan, solidified for me that it might be the best of these three films — perhaps the most artistically fruitful six-month period for any American filmmaker — and, on any given day, my favorite of the three dozen Tourneur films I’ve seen.

Wood says that these films “work by means of poetic suggestiveness rather than of clearly definable ‘meaning’ and any attempt to ‘explain’ them beyond a certain point can only do them harm.” Similarly, for Film Comment last year, Nick Pinkerton said “there is something in Tourneur’s films that has the quality of a familiar tune half heard from a distant room; even encountered for the first time, they have the poignancy of fogged memories.” The sound of castanets, the shot of a shaken branch or the long procession of the Penitente Parade, all color The Leopard Man with an ethereal sense of movement fit for the stuff of dreamland.

Additionally, Tourneur structures this film much more oddly than the other two, straying from its main characters for minutes at a time, as if the film is guided by sensory impulse. William Friedkin talks about this on his very entertaining commentary track. There’s also a commentary track from Constantine Nasr, which is fittingly rigorous and offers a flipside to Friedkin’s more casual tone.

Get Shout! Factory’s edition of The Leopard Man here

Domino (2019) – Lionsgate

The conversation around the primarily VOD release of Brian De Palma’s Domino earlier this summer was mostly filled with word of production troubles; this was not De Palma’s final version of the film. But unlike was the case with Paul Schrader in 2014, whom took to Facebook to denigrate his old buddy after watching Domino, the version that made it to the public is reportedly not a terribly bastardized, chopped up version of De Palma’s vision, but one with which he wasn’t able to consult on finishing touches, such as soundtrack and color correction.

With that in mind, I can’t help but consider Domino more of a failure, or at least mess, albeit an admirable mess, and one that holds a few moments that have burrowed into my brain, including something as arbitrary as a zoom-in on a USB cord sticking out of a dresser. Less arbitrary is a moment on a film fest red carpet, where De Palma pulls out his signature split screen for a particularly ruthless bit of violence. Interestingly, his split screen here is within the diegesis, rather than outside of it, perhaps calling attention to his own stock and trade instead of just trotting it out one more time. Domino might not be an entirely satisfying film, but as Adam Nayman detailed in his terrific review, it’s bound to give De Palma heads plenty to chew on.

The Lionsgate disc unfortunately doesn’t come with any bells and whistles, such as the featurettes on the Dragged Across Concrete and High Life discs or the director commentaries they’ve been good at including elsewhere, but perhaps not a shock considering the problemed production and director resentment.

Get Lionsgate’s edition of Domino here

Obsession (1976) – Shout! Factory

Long before Schrader took online pot shots at De Palma’s recent filmography, he wrote the screenplay for De Palma’s ninth feature, Obsession, a Vertigo riff about a kidnapping-rescue gone wrong starring Cliff Robertson and Genevieve Bujold.

Following rock-opera thriller Phantom of the Paradise, a film that could be considered a transitional text from his rough-around-edges early work, Obsession marks an even more polished leap for De Palma, incorporating more rigorous and thematically dense cinematography and an original score from Alfred Hitchc*ck’s composer, Bernard Herrmann, which would end up being his last.

The film is so consumed with De Palma’s career-length obsessions that any of Schrader’s own signature themes are obscured, but it’s interesting to note as an aside that the film’s ending, which is delightfully perverse, is composed almost identically to the last shot of Schrader’s First Reformed.

Shout!’s disc, which came out earlier this year, is absolutely stacked and marks the definitive release of the film. Besides the presentation, the vintage featurette and two interviews cover interesting and/or useful trivia, such as the details around Herrmann’s inability to remember his own score due to his dementia, or the production’s trouble shooting in a European chapel due to the subterfuge porn shoot that preceded them. Additionally, Douglas Keesey’s commentary, while being dry and clearly pre-written, is very detailed and highly recommended.

Get Shout Factory’s edition of Obsession here