A prequel of sorts to Cat People, 1943’s The Seventh Victim is also something of a warm up for Rosemary’s Baby – Satanists in New York! – and the debut of Kim Hunter, who plays the little girl lost in the big city.
It’s a bit of a mad film, not quite all adding up but stoked with atmosphere, all kicking off with schoolgirl Mary (Hunter) being called into the principal’s office at her school because her older sister, Jacqueline, has not been keeping up with the payments on the fees. She’s gone missing, it seems.
So Mary heads to New York to find her, and there tangles with one New York type after another – a private eye, her sister’s lawyer boyfriend, a shrink, a poet, a socialite, a businesswoman – most of them not quite locked into the groove they should be in. The poet, for instance, is blocked. The shrink has given up practising. The socialite is a Satanist.
In peekaboo plotting, Mary also finds her sister, who disappears again, only to reappear again, confusingly. Sister Jacqueline, it turns out, is a member of the Satanic cult and has transgressed its rules by speaking of its existence. And so she must die. This seems to be fine by Jacqueline, who spends much of the film talking about death and how she longs for it. She sleeps with a noose hanging from a rafter in her bedroom, her long straight black hair and savage fringe marking her out as some kind of existentialist rather than a nut.
It’s all very odd, especially the character of Jacqueline. Her next door neighbour, Mimi, for example, actually is going to die. She has a terminal illness and is not happy about her impending departure. In laughably strange scene she and Jacqueline have a little chat about the irony of all this while passing on the staircase, “You don’t want to die,” says Jacqueline to Mimi. “I’ve always wanted to die. Always!”
Hunter is, truth be told, a bit flat, nowhere near as lively as she’d be in A Matter of Life and Death three years later. But other members of the cast compensate. Jean Brooks as the frankly bonkers Jacqueline, played like a try-out for Morticia Addams. Tom Conway back playing Dr Louis Judd, as he did in Cat People (his character dies in that film, so this must either be a prequel or it’s set in an alternaverse). Conway is George Sanders’s brother and has the same suave voice and mannerisms. He’s an asset as the ambiguous Dr Judd. Erford Gage is a plausible wan poet. The actors who play the Satanists are better than their lack of billing too – stonefaced, gothic, chilling.
Auteur theorists who insist that a film is “authored” by the director struggle with a film like this, because it’s the producer, Val Lewton, who is really its creator. It sits alongside other Lewton movies, like Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie and his distinctively dark and unsettling dabs are all over it. That’s not to underplay the role of Mark Robson, in his directorial debut, who does good work putting flesh on Lewton’s ideas. There’s a gripping scene in which Mary, in the shower, is warned off by Satanist Mrs Redi, the entire conversation seen from Mary’s point of view, Mrs Redi just a shadow on the shower curtain.
It’s economical and atmospheric and also beautifully lit by Nicholas Musuraca, who delivers dark corridors and inky recesses offset by little pools of light offering salvation.
The film is only 71 minutes long and one explanation for the oddness of it – things happen which just do not make sense – is that Lewton and his editor John Lockert got a bit over-enthusiastic in the edit suite. But what’s a loss for narrative coherence is a gain for the atmospherics. What a strange and unsettling film this is.
The Seventh Victim (box set includes I Walked with a Zombie) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
