The Seventh Victim

What "The 7th Victim" has going for it is its uniqueness. It certainly is unlike any film from that era that I remember seeing.

This is one of those films that it helps to know nothing about before viewing. To read any sort of capsule about the flick would definitely take away from the enjoyment of the film.

Having said that, I am not totally satisfied with the payoffs the movie provides. There are too many gaps in logic, combined with a bit too much moralizing. Some people find themselves in situations in this film that just simply seem to lack any credibility.

For some fascinating sequences (most notably, one that takes place in a shower and seems to have been seen by Alfred Hitchcock) this film is definitely worth a look-see.

For me, the individual elements of the film was far more interesting than the sum of its parts.

THE SEVENTH VICTIM is one of the best films produced by Val Lewton, famous for his wartime series of low budgeted, but brillantly spooky thrillers. A young girl (Kim Hunter) tries to locate her missing sister in Manhattan. In doing so, she uncovers a witch coven. There are so many masterful moments in this classic. In one scene, she is stalked by top-hatted cultists in a deserted subway, in another scene, as she showers, a female cultist confronts her (Shades of PSYCHO?) and there are terrific shocks as an exiled cultist tries to escape the coven. A must for horror fans!

I'm amazed not one reviewer has mentioned the outstanding contribution by Jean Brooks as the missing Jacqueline Gibson. Although she makes a late appearance Jean is very impressive in her five scenes, particularly her monologue describing how she came to join the Palladists and her nighttime flight being pursued by the assassin with the switchblade. None of the Lord's prayer survives in the print shown on British television. This is strange as two lines were reportedly intact when the film was originally shown in British cinemas.The excellent Brooks who appeared in two other Lewton films was sadly wasted by RKO and subsequently relegated to support and bit roles.

As a longtime booster of The Cat People, I tended to give the credit to its director Jacques Tourneur (later to helm Out of the Past). Seeing The Seventh Victim, also from Val Lewton's B-movie unit at RKO, changed all that. It seems Lewton was the resident genius, cobbling together stylish horror/suspense films on shoestring budgets. The young Kim Hunter, away at a private school, learns that her tuition hasn't been paid because her sister, owner of a beauty empire, has disappeared. She leaves school and starts scouring New York's Greenwich Village (also the locale of much of The Cat People) only to uncover a cult of devil worshipers. Lewton's thrillers haven't dated the way James Whale's, for instance, have, possibly because they depend so heavily on suggestion; the literalness of today's "horror" films is completely alien to these suggestive, truly chilling films. The RKO B-movie unit under Lewton was also, probably, a major influence on the look of film noir, soon to become the cutting-edge aesthetic in American movies. This is as tense and satisfying a 75 minutes as you'll find until the Mann/Alton team's seminal noirs of a few years later.

I'm not sure if this is the film that officially caused RKO to rein in their errant art-horror guru--and stick him with Boris Karloff to make sure they got actual horror, just like Universal--but, more than most Lewton films that started out as a completely different story, this one's probably his most muddled. The story feels like it spends so much time trying to be an "allegory" for something, it's hard to nail down what it actually is.

Supposedly, we follow virginal girls'-school student Kim Hunter, as she has to go to New York to track down her missing sister who disappeared into the Greenwich Village life, and later discovers her sister has been marked for death by a sinister occult organization among the city elite, and you can never tell who might be In On It--Call it "Rosemary's Sister". There's an intriguing beginning with a private detective, two helpful male romantic-leads, and the usual Cat People-esque Val Lewton nervous street chases, but once we meet the sister, the story keeps trying to lecture us on something else.

We learn that the sister was starting to feel unfulfilled and suicidal, but once the Sinister Organization catches up with her, to "sacrifice" her into silence, their method is to sit her at a table and browbeat her into trying to drink a glass of poison--after all, she wanted to kill herself, didn't she?--like Eyes Wide Shut re-enacting the Death of Socrates. And although we're told who the Sinister Occult Organization is, we never actually see them doing anything sinister or occult: With a few rewrites, the baddies could just as easily have been secret Nazi saboteurs, and, in DeWitt Bodeen's earlier murder-mystery draft of the story, probably were.

The movie ends with our two heroes catching up with the baddies and self-righteously lecturing them, for reasons that seem to go a lot deeper than just being Sinister or Occult.

Unlike the usual tight Lewton button-pushing (there's a neat chill that foreshadows Hitchcock's shower scene, seventeen years early), there's so much Message, Metaphor and Allegory muddling the thriller, it feels like a screenwriter wanted to get something off his chest. It's the kind of story that a screenwriter would write after going through his own personal issues, and forget to not make them so personal for the studio. I give it 6/10 for being so ponderous, as many films from 1943 were.