In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based on where my interests lead me.
Val Lewton didn’t have a long career in the movie business (he died at age 46 in 1951) but he did have a memorable one. After an early career as a reporter (he was fired for totally making up a story), writing sexy pulps (best-known title: No Bed of Her Own), and creating novelizations of popular movies, he got a job working for David O. Selznick courtesy of his mother (a real go-getter who was also Alla Nazimova’s sister). Lewton gained experience in the moving business while doing all sorts of odd jobs for Selznick, from editing stories to negotiating with censors to writing the Gone with the Wind scene where the camera pulls back to reveal hundreds of wounded soldiers lying in a rail yard and a tattered Confederate war flag flying over it all.
In 1942 Lewton was appointed head of RKO’s horror unit, created in the wake of the box-office success enjoyed by the Universal horror films. All his films were low-budget B pictures, created to match titles supplied to him by the studio, but working in the shadows of the big pictures seemed to suit Lewton. At RKO, he created a unique style of horror that relied on suggestion rather than visible monsters or special effects, while the lack of studio supervision allowed him to fly under the radar and include subject matter that would have been censored in a big-budget film. Some of the nine horror films he produced for RKO between 1942 and 1945 were hits and some were flops, but as a group they are uniquely valued by connoisseurs of the genre for their distinctive and effective approach to horror.
The main story line in The Seventh Victim concerns the efforts of the young and innocent but extremely determined Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter in her film debut) to locate her sister Jacqueline (a striking Jean Brooks). Mary’s efforts uncover a second story line: Jacqueline’s persecution by a band of Satan worshippers (called “the Palladists” after a 19th-centry hoax) who feel she has betrayed them (six others have done so, hence the title). Various people are entangled in one or both of the plot threads, including the frightening Mrs. Reddy (Mary Newton, who plays a threatening role in a shower scene 17 years before Psycho), the love-smitten duo of Jason Hoag (Erford Gage) and Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont), the exuberant restauranteur and landlord Mr. Jacob (Chef Milani), Jacqueline’s tubercular neighbor Mimi (Elizabeth Russell), and the hapless private detective Irving August (Lou Lubin).
The great strength of The Seventh Victim lies in its ability to create a mood, from the oily elegance of the Satanists to a terrifying trip on the New York subway and an equally terrifying night walk through Greenwich Village. Cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca was a master of the film noir style, while director Mark Robson gets great performances out of his cast. Lewton also had the courage to explore forbidden topics, in an era when film censors found lesbians more threatening than Satanists. And yet the former play a major role in the film, beginning with the film’s opening scene, in which Mildred Gilchrist (Eve March) warns Mary to not take the easy road lest she become yet another plaything of the domineering headmistress Miss Lowood (Ottola Nesmith; her name refers to the abusive boarding school in Jane Eyre). A second lesbian plotline involves the sweet but not too bright hairdresser Frances Fallon (Isabelle Jewell), who is clearly in love with Jacqueline, while the fact that many characters are associated with Greenwich Village gives the whole film a countercultural vibe.
The Seventh Victim was a box office and critical bomb on first release in 1943, due largely to the hash made of the story in the editing suite. There’s too many characters and too many plot threads and too much that simply doesn’t make any sense, and contemporary audiences looking for easily consumable entertainment weren’t having any of it. Today, all that is as nothing compared to the images and scenes Lewton conjures up and the generally creepy vibe that is his trademark. Sense? Who needs a plot to make sense when the atmosphere is so delectable? Plus The Seventh Victim has one of the most subtle yet chilling conclusions in the history of film, so be sure you don’t miss it. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 1236
Technical details: 71 min.; B&W; screen ratio 1.37:1; English.
Edition reviewed: Blu-ray (1 disc)
Extras: audio commentary by Steve Haberman; additional Lewton feature I Walked with a Zombie with audio commentary by Kim Newman and Stephen Jones; video interview with film historian Imogen Sara Smith; audio essays from Adam Roche’s podcast The Secret History of Hollywood featuring Tom Conway and Jean Brooks; documentary Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy (2005); excerpt from the PBS series Monstrum episode “The Origins of the Zombie, from Haiti to the U.S.” (to be honest, it’s pretty tacky); trailers for both films; booklet with essays by Lucy Sante and Chris Fujiwara.
Fun Fact: The impressive staircase used in the film’s opening sequence was previously featured in Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons. Jason’s artist loft also looks a lot like the locked room in Lewis Allen’s The Uninvited, but the latter was a Paramount film so maybe it’s just a common type of set used back in the day.
Parting Thought: Val Lewton is on record as saying the theme of this movie is “death is good” but do we have to take the producer’s proclamation as the final word?
