Film Review: The Seventh Victim (1943)

7 months ago

(source: tmdb.org)

Classic Hollywood is rightfully considered as the golden age of American cinema. Yet, anyone expecting that all films of that period were classics or even superior to the films we might find today is going to be disappointed from time to time. One such disappointment is The Seventh Victim, 1943 horror film directed by Mark Robson.

The film was produced by Val Lewton, film maker best known for the series of low budget but influential horror films in production of RKO Pictures, which had started with Cat People one year earlier. One of the characters in that film was psychiatrist Dr. Louis Judd (played by Tom Conway), who also appears in this film, so that would make The Seventh Victim as sequel or, more precisely, a prequel. The nominal protagonist, played by Kim Hunter in her screen debut, is Mary Gibson, student at expensive boarding school who gets informed that her wealthy sister Jacqueline (played by Janet Brooks) has stopped paying her tuition after apparently disappearing. Mary leaves school and goes to New York City to look for her. She finds that Jacqueline has sold her cosmetics business to her assistant Esther Redi (played by Mary Newton). With the help of number of unusual characters like ambulance chasing private detective Irving August (played by Lou Lubin) and poet Jason Hoag (played by Erford Gage) she discovers that Jacqueline was actually married to lawyer Gregory Ward (played by Hugh Beaumont) who also joins her quest. Jacqueline is actually alive, but it turns out that she became member of Palladist, a devil worshipping sect that have policy of non-violence yet demand that anyone that betrays them must die. That means that Jacqueline will be subjected to psychological terror aimed to make her take her own life.

From a strictly technical standpoint, The Seventh Victim is well-made film. Black-and-white cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca is effective in creating atmosphere of despair and dread, while Mark Robson, former editor who worked on Citizen Kane, manages to effectively reconstruct New York City on RKO studio sets. Cast is also solid, with young Kim Hunter providing good performance. However, all those talents are wasted on subpar script by DeWitt Bodden and Charles O’Neal. What was originally envisioned as relatively simple murder mystery got needlessly complicated with large number of characters, many of which don’t serve any purpose (like Dr. Judd). To make things worse, those characters don’t have much time to be properly fleshed out due to Lewton insisting that the film must be not more than 70 minutes long. That meant that some of explanatory scenes had to be cut, resulting in a confusing film with surprisingly bleak, but abrupt and unsatisfactory ending. There are some elements that make The Seventh Victim unusual, like the motive of suicide which openly toyed with some taboos set by Hays Code censors or the scene that suggests that Frances Fallon (played by Isabel Jewel), former Jacqueline’s employee, might have lesbian feelings towards her employer. Some of the film historians noted the scene in which protagonist receives unwelcome guest while under shower, which might have been one of the inspiration for Hitchcock’s Pyscho. This, however, meant very little to the audience after the premiere and The Seventh Victim failed at the box office. Modern audience, at least those viewers unimpressed with the mystique of Classic Hollywood, might agree with the initial verdict.

RATING: 4/10 (+)