The Seventh Victim (RKO, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran the last two movies in The Val Lewton Collection horror box that we hadn’t watched before or during Hallowe’en, The Seventh Victim and The Ghost Ship. The Seventh Victim was one I’d written about fairly recently – I have a moviemagg blog post about it from the day after Hallowe’en 2020 at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-seventh-victim-rko-1943.html and it’s one of my favorite Lewton productions. Directed by Mark Robson (who cost Lewton his chance at an “A” production budget because the bosses at RKO insisted they’d give him a larger budget but only if he used an experienced director instead of someone whom Lewton had just promoted from editor to director and who hadn’t directed a film yet) from a script by Charles F. O’Neal (Ryan O’Neal’s father and Tatum O’Neal’s grandfather) and Cat People writer DeWitt Bodeen, The Seventh Victim is an intriguing blend of horror and film noir. It begins with Mary Gibson (a rather gawky Kim Hunter, who like Robson was making her first film; she was 20 when she made it, she got an “Introducing” credit and her clear inexperience as an actress sometimes works to suggest the character’s naïveté and sometimes just seems incompetent, the sort of early performance that makes you keep reminding yourself, “She got better”) being summoned by the headmistress of the private school she’s attending, Miss Rowan (Marianne Mosher). (Charles and I both heard the name as “Miss Lowood” after the school Jane Eyre attended in Charlotte Brontë’s novel, which had been the basis for Lewton’s I Walked With a Zombie two films earlier in his canon.)

It seems that Mary’s older sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks, first wife of director Richard Brooks) hasn’t contacted the school in six months, and Mary has been relying on Jacqueline to pay her tuition. The headmistress says Mary canc continue on at the school if she becomes a part-time teaching assistant, and when Mary expresses concern about Jacqueline the headmistress loans her money to go to New York and see if she can find her. When she gets there she’s advised to report Jacqueline’s disappearance to the Missing Persons’ Bureau of the New York Police Department, and she’s also approached by a sleazy private detective named Irving August (Lou Lubin) who offers to find Jacqueline for $50. Mary tells him she doesn’t have that kind of money, but after August is approached by a couple of thugs named Leo (Feodor Chaliapin, Jr. – I had no idea the great Russian bass singer had a son who acted) and Durk (Wally Brown, then co-starring with Alan Carney in an RKO comedy series meant to compete with Abbott and Costello at Universal) and warned off the case, he agrees to take it for free. Mary also visits the offices of La Sagesse, the successful cosmetics company Jacqueline had founded, and finds it’s been taken over by the formidable Esther Reti (Evelyn Brent). Mary asks Frances Fallon (Isabel Jewell) what it’s like to work for Reti as opposed to Jacqueline, and is told that Jacqueline was a much more easy-going boss and Redi is much more hard-assed.

Through Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont), who introduces himself to Mary as Jacqueline’s boyfriend but is actually her husband, Mary meets some of Jacqueline’s other friends, including burned-out poet Jason Hoag (Erford Gage, who enlisted in the U.S. Army shortly after making this film and died in March 1945 in combat in the Philippines) and psychiatrist Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway, top-billed). The presence of Dr. Judd in the dramatis personae makes this a prequel to Cat People, in which Conway played the same character and got murdered at the end. Gregory takes her to Dante’s, a restaurant owned by an older Italian couple, and learns that Jacqueline has rented a room upstairs from Dante’s with a hangman’s noose hanging from the ceiling. Apparently Jacqueline set it up for use to commit suicide whenever she decided she was tired of living. Dr. Judd shows Mary a strange design of three concentric parallelograms with a break in the bottom of one, and later Mrs. Redi tells her it’s the logo she adopted for La Sagesse’s cosmetics products when she took the company over. Ultimately it’s revealed that Jacqueline was a member of a secret Satanic cult called the Palladists, which had at least supposedly existed since the Middle Ages. One night Mary and Irving August broke into the offices of La Sagesse and Irving entered a locked room in the building, only to be stabbed to death by a mysterious occupant who turned out to be Jacqueline.

Lewton and Robson stage Irving’s murder and the subsequent removal of the body by Leo and Durk (as in Broadway and Alibi, they carry the body between them by pretending they’re escorting a friend who’s drunk but alive) in Lewton’s best less-is-more style; we don’t see August get stabbed and indeed we see him stagger out of the room after being stabbed before both Mary and we see the knife sticking out of his chest and we realize he’s been killed. Jacqueline and Mary have one more brief meeting before Dr. Judd, Gregory and Jason trace her to a secret meeting of the Palladists, who sentence her to death because in seeking professional help from Dr. Judd, she revealed the cult’s secrets. The film ends with its long set-piece in which Jacqueline, having escaped from her would-be rescuers, walks through the streets of New York’s Greenwich Village on her way to her rendezvous with death; her spirits pick up briefly when she encounters a group of actors who emerge from a theatre during a break in the comedy play they’re performing, and another woman renting a room in the Dante’s building, who’s clearly dying of tuberculosis, insists that she’s going to dress up and have one last night on the town before she expires. Jacqueline enters the room with the noose in it, and once again in the best Lewton style we don’t actually see her hang herself. Instead we only hear the sounds of what she’s done, and fortunately Lewton, Robson, O’Neal and Bodeen avoided having a scene of Jacqueline’s friends bursting into the fatal room and arriving too late to rescue her.

What strikes me about The Seventh Victim is its economy; we’re not told what the Palladists are, what they believe in, or how they recruited Jacqueline, and though there’s a clunky scene towards the end in which Dr. Judd and Gregory confront the self-described Satanists by reciting verses from the Lord’s Prayer at them (the sort of thing that would become more common in the 1950’s as “Godless Communism” replaced Nazism as the great anti-American evil, and even otherwise brilliant films like The Day the Earth Stood Still and This Island Earth were marred by these forced references to God), for the most part the Palladists are depicted as any other church group much the way the sun-worshipers were in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much. The best thing I can say about The Seventh Victim is it’s a film that forces us to do some of the work and fill in the blanks instead of having everything spelled out for us in excruciating detail.