Mark Robson

The Seventh Victim

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Kim Hunter as Mary

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 … Read more

Phffft

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Nina and Robert dance

The comedy of remarriage is really a creature of the 1930s but here it is alive and reasonably well in 1954 in Phffft, a screwbally kind of thing starring Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday as a married couple of eight years who decide wedlock isn’t for them, then try the alternatives only to eventually have a rethink about why they got divorced in the first place. Eight years, not seven. Columbia had actually wanted to make a version of George Axelrod’s hit play The Seven Year Itch but the rights were tied up (it would become a Twentieth Century Fox film directed by Billy Wilder the following year) and so Axelrod sold them … Read more