The Seventh Victim (RKO, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Them! TCM showed a film that crossed genre lines, at once horror and film noir, Val Lewton’s 1943 vest-pocket masterpiece The Seventh Victim, a film I’ve long had an affection for even though I can also see room for improvement in it and I’d love to see a modern remake. In 1942 Val Lewton, a former journalist and pulp writer who had been hired as David O. Selznick’s West Coast story editor (he also had an East Coast story editor, Kay Brown, and in a weird bit of revenge-taking because Selznick had bought Gone With the Wind on Brown’s recommendation after Lewton had told him to pass on it, Selznick had Lewton stand outside the theatre’s restrooms and count how many people used them during Gone With the Wind’s preview screening, information Selznick wanted because he was having an argument with his distributor, MGM, over whether to have an intermission in the film and he wanted to document that so many people would need to use the bathroom during the film that an intermission would be necessary), was picked by Charles Koerner, newly appointed studio head at RKO, to head a new horror unit that would make “B” films. Lewton was given three restrictions -- his films couldn’t cost more than $150,000 to make, they couldn’t run longer than 75 minutes, and the titles would be given to him by RKO’s marketing department based on what they thought they could sell to the horror audience -- but within those limits he could do pretty much whatever he wanted.

Lewton decided that with that little money he couldn’t do the kinds of out-front monster extravangae Universal made, so he wouldn’t try; instead he would use shadows and creative sound editing to scare audiences without having to show much of anything. One of the things that made Lewton’s movies so good was that he inherited virtually the entire staff Orson Welles had assembled to make his early-1940’s masterpieces, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, which had both been financial baths for the studio. Koerner had been brought in to replace George Schaefer, the studio head who’d signed Welles, and he immediately announced that from then on RKO films would feature “Showmanship Instead of Genius.” Koerner hired Lew Ostrow, who had previously produced the Hardy Family series at MGM, and Ostrow in turn hired Lewton. “When Orson was, so to speak, ‘evicted’ from RKO -- he was given a few hours to move out --most of the people who had been associated with him were punished, because of our love for him, because of our hopes for him,” The Seventh Victim director Mark Robson recalled. Fortunately, most of the people demoted to the “B” unit as punishment for having worked with Welles -- including Robson and Robert Wise, who had co-edited Citizen Kane -- were grabbed by Lewton, who as someone who had decided to make his films unusually creative sonically naturally could use people who had trained with a master of radio drama like Welles.

Both Robson and Wise made their debuts as directors on Lewton projects, Robson on The Seventh Victim and Wise on The Body Snatcher (Lewton’s first period piece and his first film with established horror stars Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi; when Lewton was told RKO had signed Karloff and was assigning him to his unit, Lewton protested because Karloff represented exactly the kind of in-your-face horror Lewton was trying to avoid … until he and Karloff actually met and Karloff told Lewton how much he loved his films and looked forward to the chance to work with him), and both went on to quite long and productive careers. Lewton’s first film as producer was Cat People, and originally it disappointed RKO executives who had expected a film about a were-cat to feature a woman with fangs, claws and fur like Lon Chaney, Jr. in Universal’s The Wolf-Man -- until it got released and grossed $4 million, thereby making up most of RKO’s losses on Orson Welles. That and the next two films Lewton produced, I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man, were directed by Jacques Tourneur, son of another director who’d been hired from France to work in Hollywood, Maurice Tourneur; Tourneur fils hadn’t established a reputation from under the shadow of Tourneur pere until the success of Cat People. After the three films he and Lewton made together, the studio decided to pull them apart and they offered Lewton higher budgets -- only to renege when they found Lewton wanted to give Mark Robson his first directorial job on his next production.

The Seventh Victim was an original story by Charles “Blackie” O’Neal (father of Ryan O’Neal and grandfather of Tatum O’Neal) and Cat People writer DeWitt Bodeen, and it begins in a convent school (actually a recycling of the set of Amberson Manor from The Magnificent Ambersons, complete with the stained-glass panels representing faith, hope and charity Welles and his art director, Mark-Lee Kirk, had meticulously reproduced from the description of them in Booth Tarkington’s novel), in which student Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter, in her first film -- she gets an “Introducing” credit) is summoned by the headmistress and told that her sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks, then-wife of writer and future director Richard Brooks), who’d raised Mary since the death of their parents, hasn’t been heard from or paid the school’s tuition in eight months. The headmistress (who has the ironic name “Miss Lowood” -- “Lowood” was the name of the boarding school where Jane Eyre grew up in Charlotte Bronte’s novel) agrees to loan Mary some money with which to go to New York and see if she can trace her sister. Miss Lowood also says that if things don’t work out for her in the big city she can always come back and they’ll hire her as a teacher -- whereupon she’s accosted by Miss Gilchrist, another member of the school’s staff, who warns her not to come back to the school because then she’ll never leave again and never have the kind of life she could have experienced outside its walls.

Mary duly arrives in New York and finds herself surrounded with various “types,” including the middle-aged couple (Chef Milani and Marguerita Sylva) who own the Italian restaurant where Jacqueline was a regular and the beauty products company, La Sagesse, which Jacqueline founded and built into a success. Only now the company is being run by Esther Redi (Mary Newton), a sinister heavy-set middle-aged woman. Mary is shocked when she learns that her sister sold Redi the business -- and is even more shocked when she finds that Jacqeline didn’t sell the business but gave it to her outright. Redi also changed the company’s logo to feature a parallelogram with a slash in the middle -- symbol of a Satanic cult called the Palladists that was founded in the Middle Ages and has been revived in contemporary New York. An opportunistic private detective named Irving August offers to help Mary find Jacqueline for $50; the two break into La Sagesse after hours and narrowly miss the watchman, only when August goes into a secret room he’s mysteriously stabbed and killed by an assailant we never see. Mary also meets the men in her sister’s life -- psychiatrist Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway, reviving his character from Cat People -- and thereby establishing this story as taking place before Cat People because in that film Judd was killed by the cat-woman after he made a pass at her); Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont), whom at first Mary assumes Jacqueline was merely dating but later is shocked to find was actually married to her; and Jason Hoag (Erford Gage), who 10 years earlier published a book of poetry that was hailed as a masterpiece but since then has been blocked and hasn’t written anything.

Mary finally meets Jacqueline -- whose long, sculpted black hair practically becomes a character itself -- but Jacqueline is a death-obsessed space case who’s rented a room in the building that houses the Italian restaurant in which she’s hung a noose she intends to use when she’s finally got tired of living. She’s also run afoul of the Palladists, whom she joined as a thrill-seeker and then earned her wrath when she tried to leave. They locked her into a room in the basement of La Sagesse -- the one Irving August tried to enter -- and she was the one who killed him because in her disoriented state she was sure he was there to kill her. The final scene packs the biggest wallop of the whole movie; Jacqueline escapes both the Palladists and the well-meaning good guys who are totally unaware of what they’re up against and walks through the city streets, encountering various New York characters -- including a troupe of actors she runs into while they’re on intermission but still in costume, one of whom makes a crude pass at her -- and she finally makes it back to the room above the restaurant. She runs into her next-door neighbor, a woman who used to be a “regular” on the club scene until she got tuberculosis, who dresses in one of her old lame outfits for one last night on the town before she croaks. She goes into the room she’s rented and hung the noose -- in yet another touch of Lewtonesque irony the room number is 7, ordinarily a symbol of good luck -- and she closes the door and we hear her voice as a voice-over recite the epigram from one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets we saw in a title just after the opening credits: “I runne to death, and death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterday.” It was so Val Lewton to construct an entire film leading up to the heroine’s suicide and then not show it to us!

Indeed, the ending confused the original audiences and, according to TCM commentator Harry Muller, made The Seventh Victim the first Lewton production to lose money -- though, given how “B” movies were sold to theatres on a flat-fee basis instead of a percentage,as long as Lewton kept it on budget it’s hard to imagine how it could have lost money even if audiences didn’t like it. But while American audiences may not have taken to it, The Seventh Victim became a cult film in Britain, as Robson found out when the British producers John and Roy Boulting visited him after World War II. “They used to bicycle a print of The Seventh Victim around London,” Robson recalled, “among them Carol Reed and Cavalcanti and people like that, thinking it an advanced and weird form of filmmaking.” The Seventh Victim has some clunky moments -- among them Tom Conway’s character trying to embarrass the Satanists at their meeting by reciting the Lord’s Prayer -- and Kim Hunter’s performance is promising but hardly up to her later standards, but overall it’s still a quite remarkable movie and one thing I particularly like about it is it has no supernatural elements: the Palladists are just a cult and we’re not expected to believe they’re in touch either with a real Satan or some eldritch Lovecraftian creature they’re worshiping as such.