DeMille and the Leopard

In 1929, legendary filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille told a story to a group of film engineers about needing to shoot a scene with Thomas Meighan, Gloria Swanson, and a leopard in Male and Female (1919). As cast and crew gathered on set, DeMille found that the planned fake animal would simply not work. They found a leopard at a nearby zoo that was due to the executed because it had recently killed a man. The plan was to shoot the animal and use its corpse in the movie. Once he saw it, however, DeMille decided that he simply couldn’t kill such a magnificent animal and instead chose an alternative option:

I said, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Get a lot of chloroform and ether and some sponges.” The property man rushed off and bought all the chloroform and ether in Hollywood and we poured it on these sponges and put it into the leopard’s cage, and put something across the front. There was terrible to-do inside the cage, a rocking back and forth and there were frightful noises. Pretty soon everything was quiet and we opened the cage and the leopard was taken out. The scene was all rehearsed and ready. We put the leopard over Tommy’s shoulder and said “All right, Tommy, go ahead.” We had men with Winchester 30-30’s all around this love scene, and it was rather a long love scene. We had to take it two or three times. Toward the end of the last time­­—I don’t know whether you gentlemen know all about ether—you probably know more about it than I do; I don’t know whether you ever heard anyone coming out of ether or chloroform or a mixture of the two, but this mixture has a strange effect, and in the middle of the love scene this leopard started. He was perfectly unconscious, but you have heard people talk under the influence of ether. Well, this leopard talked and talked in the middle of this impassioned love scene, and Tommy, with Gloria’s hand pressed on his heart said, “Mr. DeMille, I tell you he is coming to.”

DeMille told the audience that this story was to demonstrate the “esprit de corps of the motion picture profession, and I know of nothing that will better show it to you.” For DeMille, this tale revealed that “Men will give their lives, gentlemen, to carry through. Nothing will stop them. They will do anything.” Indeed, this spirit, for better and worse, remains true to this day. The unspoken additional lesson is that there have always been people like DeMille to take full advantage of it. In his remarks on the admiration of the animal, he never explains why the actor flung it, of course.

Male & Female (1919) from Cinema of Change on Vimeo.