Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (1946)

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (1946) ** (out of 4) The tenth film in Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan series is without question the dumbest so far as I'm sure a 5-year-old could have came up with a better plot. This time out people are being killed by what appears to be leopards but Tarzan isn't so sure. It turns out that a woman (Acquanetta) has grown tired of the changes going on in Africa so she's brought together hundreds of people who are dressing as leopards and attacking people. Yeah, once you stop laughing over this plot you're going to realize that there's really not too much going on in this film. At 72-minutes the film seems to drag on longer than ROOTS and for the life of me I can't wrap my brain around what the producers were thinking. The only possible explanation is that there wasn't any money left at RKO to hire someone to come up with a good story so they took the silliest thing they could come up with. The biggest problem is that the story is just so far-fetched that it's impossible to ever feel threatened by the killers. Their costumes are all rather silly and seeing dozens of men running around the jungle in these outfits just made one want to laugh. There's never any real drama, no suspenseful scenes and even the comedy bits with Cheetah are just downright weak and they never get a single laugh. Weissmuller, for the first time in the series, appears to be very bored as he doesn't give the character a bit of life and usually you can just see the joy coming out of the actor but that's not the case here. Brenda Joyce is back as Jane and offers up a decent performance but the screenplay doesn't offer her much. Johnny Sheffield is back as Boy and the most shocking thing is seeing how much he has grown since the previous movie, which was shot less than a year before this one. Acquanetta, best remember for playing Paula the Ape Woman in Universal's CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN, isn't given much of a role here but she at least looks good in her outfits. Tommy Cook plays a pretty important role as Kimba, a child spy but his character is so annoying that you really can't help but hate him and want to see Boy bash him into the ground. You can tell that RKO had pretty much given this thing as little attention as possible as the sets aren't nearly as good, the story poor and there's simply not an ounce of energy to be found anywhere in the picture. TARZAN AND THE LEOPARD WOMAN is a pretty bland movie from start to finish and what's even worse is how boring it is even in the Saturday-matinée feel.

Tarzan and the Leopard Woman is a Tarzan adventure from 1946.It's directed by Kurt Neumann.In the story Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan faces a tribe of leopard-worshippers.These people are dressed in leopard skins and they kill in the jungle using their fake claws.The tribe is led by Queen Lea, the high priestess (Acquanetta).Tarzan and his family live a rather peaceful life in their jungle home.But he knows the travellers killed near Zambezi were not killed by leopards.Then one day Queen Lea sends her brother Kimba, played by Tommy Cook, to Tarzan's place.Tarzan and Boy (Johnny Sheffield) do not trust this kid.But Jane, portrayed by Brenda Joyce, gets a bit too close to him.And she faces danger when she's alone in the house with him.One day Tarzan and a caravan of four teachers (Iris Flores, Lillian Molieri, Helen Gerald and Kay Solinas) get captured by the Leopard people.This is a very good Tarzan adventure.It offers plenty of great action.It's thrilling to watch Tarzan and those pretty teachers being chased around the jungle.Cheetah offers some comedy.This is a must-see for every Tarzan fan.

This was a little strange to view at first because I had never seen a Johnny Weismuller-Tarzan film of the 1940s. I was only familiar with the earlier stuff with Weismuller and Maureen O'Sullivan as "Jane." By the mid '40s when this was made (and others), Brenda Joyce had replace O'Sullivan. A blonde-haired "Jane" looked strange to me. Their son, "Boy," still played by Johnny Sheffield, was another shock of sorts. He now was a teenager with muscles and a changing voice. That didn't look or sound right! Tarzan himself had become a regular English-speaking person, even though he still lived in the jungle. He came into town and everyone knew him and talked to him as if he was one of them. It was just all too strange.Meanwhile, "the leopard woman" (Acquanetta) wasn't as mysterious as she was billed nor was she much of an actress, just a pretty face. She didn't have that big a role, anyway.All in all, not a video worth keeping.

This Tarzan adventure is about a cult of leopard worshipers who are incited by one of their own to kill outsiders who want to civilize jungle inhabitants. An educated doctor plots the killing of neighboring tribes to make it look like the work of killer leopards. The killers attack other tribes and caravans as they travel through the jungle until Tarzan figures out that the killings are done by man instead of the big cats. The film has some good moments but the plot is rather silly and illustrates how this venerable series seemed to be winding down after many years of popularity with audiences. Johnny Weissmuller reprises his role as the fearless jungle man, with Brenda Joyce along as Jane. Johnny Sheffield and Cheta round out the usual cast of characters.