so does ancient sin cling to the low places,
the depressions in the world consciousness.
- Dr. Louis Judd, The Anatomy of Atavism
[also attr. Sigmund Freud]
To offset its then precarious financial position, in 1942 RKO Pictures brought in Val Lewton to head a small production unit specializing in horror films. The limitations placed on the productions were: low budget, tight schedule, pre-selected titles, and running time not longer than 75 minutes. Within these parameters Lewton was given a large amount of creative freedom, especially if the movies delivered, i.e. made money. And they did. The result was a series of poetically beautiful and haunting films, nine in all, most of them running little more than an hour. Released from 1942 to 1946, the films are: Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, The Seventh Victim, The Ghost Ship, Curse of the Cat People, The Body Snatcher, Isle of the Dead, and Bedlam, and they delight film historians and devotees to this day.
And yes, I confess to being very much a fan of the Val Lewton oeuvre, and share the growing consensus that the first four films (Cat People, Zombie, Leopard Man and Victim) are the best. The remaining five are respectable, even exemplary works, especially when considered against the standard B movie fare being cranked out at the time. But with their emphasis on story and character over mood and atmosphere, the five later entries lacked the visual poetry and philosophical underpinnings of the previous four. Anyhow, and with a nod to Cat People and Zombie as arguably the best of all the Lewton films, I come back to The Seventh Victim and its seemingly inexhaustible font of riches. So much so that, upon repeated viewings, I have the sneaking suspicion that, in its modest way Seventh Victim may indeed be Lewton’s ultimate masterpiece in the sense that it's the most perfect realization of his dark aesthetic vision.
One of the many delights of Victim is that it’s a film that can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. Feminist, behaviorist, romanticist, Freudian, metaphysical, and of course purely cinematic takes have gushed forth over time. In many respects it’s a profoundly disturbing film – dreamlike, enigmatic, witty, highbrow, absurdist and frightening – it revels in the subterranean realms of both our conscious and unconscious experience. One could go on and on; commentators have gone on and on.
Many issues arise within the film’s deceptively brief 71 minutes, and most of said issues remain unresolved. Moreover, despite its satanic backdrop, The Seventh Victim is the first Val Lewton film that’s not about the supernatural. Both the previous Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie contained more or less overt supernatural elements, and even Leopard Man, a hybrid mystery/horror film, flirts with the magical by way of its prescient fortune teller, who incidentally is not a gypsy but a very blonde Anglo (Isabel Jewell). Curiously, she uses the standard four-suit fifty-two card deck for her readings instead of the traditional Tarot cards. In any case, Seventh Victim relies on a dark overlay of nihilistic despair and no exit fatalism, conveyed in very human terms through its picaresque characters and, even more so, the noirish visuals that stunningly suggest the nighttime menace of a large urban metropolis.
While it’s somewhat cliché to give top honors to the film’s chiaroscuro look and in particular the stellar work done by ace cameraman Nicholas Musuraca, subsequent viewings of The Seventh Victim, all the Lewton thrillers for that matter, reveal other, unsung heroes, in particular Roy Webb’s low keyed scores, the always literate, usually literary, scripts, and the invariably spot-on casts.
Like The Leopard Man which immediately preceded it, The Seventh Victim has its share of abrupt transitions and awkward cuts. Its labyrinthine universe also includes complex characters, bizarre plot twists, and several plot dead ends. Consequently it’s difficult to say who the protagonist, hero, heroine, or villain, really is.
In the first third of the film the clear lead is Mary (Kim Hunter). In the middle third she gives way to the three male leads, Jason, Gregory and Dr. Judd [1], who ultimately pass the baton to Jacqueline (Jean Brooks), and only rightly so. She’s the emotional and spiritual glue that holds the film together, and her disappearance is what sets everything in motion by way of Mary’s quest, all the while the devil worshippers lurking in deep background. Indeed the Satanic cult that goes by the name of the Palladists might be seen as the true star of the film’s final third [2]. And it’s their inclusion that makes Seventh Victim the existential masterpiece that it is. To wit, would this film possibly have the same resonance had Jacqueline fallen in with drug smugglers or Nazi spies instead of Satan worshippers?
The film’s Sapphic undercurrent has been much discussed elsewhere so we’ll not dwell on it here, except to offer a few observations [4]. To be sure, there are subtextual elements to be found in at least one prior Lewton work, Cat People [5]. But in Victim the coded references are now brought out into the open, albeit in a plausibly deniable way (this was the early Forties, after all). Thus, and with the debatable exception of Dr. Judd, Jacqueline’s most significant relationships, both emotional and (implied) physical, are with women, not men. And this includes her sister Mary. Indeed, if we interpret the the clues subtextually, there are decided suggestions of lesbian incest between Jacqueline and Mary. In this context the coven of Greenwich Village devil worshippers might be seen as proxies for a group that needed to be cloistered and remain in the closet. Interestingly, this same idea was revived a decade and a half later in the film Bell, Book, and Candle, in which a nest of witches who reside in Greenwich Village is forced to keep their existence under wraps out of fear of discovery and resultant persecution.
Be that as it may, most of the Palladists are well-spoken, even cultivated, and all have a touch of the ambiguous. There’s the brusque, vaguely masculine Mrs. Redi. Then we have the shapely blonde who breathlessly exclaims to Mary that she and Jacqueline “were intimate.” This same claim might be made by Frances (Isabel Jewell), so obviously besmitten as she is with Jacqueline. Although the lady at the party is quite a bit taller and fleshier than the petite Frances, it’s easy to confuse the two women. Fascinating that the unnamed blonde lady (who also has an eye for Dr. Judd) doesn’t reappear in the film, and, like the others present at this soireé, she may or may not be a member of the devil worship cult. True to Lewtonian form, the relationships and connections in The Seventh Victim are sketchy at best: more is implied than actually spelled out.
There’s also the exotic hostess Mrs. Cortez [6], provocatively dressed in outfits that suggest designer nightgowns; and finally the elegantly sinister head devil worshipper Mr. Brun. Rounding out the mix are two thugs named Leo and Dirk and a mysterious satanic hit man. By the way, Mr. Brun becomes progressively less appealing as the story unfolds. Unable to browbeat Jacqueline into drinking poison-laced wine as punishment for her supposed betrayal, he literally strong arms her into leaving the apartment, to fend for herself amid the city’s dark streets.
With no disrespect to journeyman director Mark Robson, who did a fine job on the film, Seventh Victim might well be considered Jacques Tourneur’s fourth Lewton film in everything but credit only. He directed the first three Lewtons, and Tourneur-like vignettes and set pieces are everywhere in Victim [8], even if they lack the French master’s final touch of elegance. But ultimately it’s the long shadow of Val Lewton that hovers over The Seventh Victim. The auteur producer was a status often aspired to throughout the history of the movies but rarely attained. Few achieved it so profoundly or completely as Val Lewton.
[1] Dr. Judd is played by Tom Conway, thus an immediate connection to Cat People since Dr. Judd appears in that film as well (also played by Conway). But the connections don’t end there: of all the Lewton horror films Seventh Victim is most akin to Cat People both in style and content. Indeed it's not too much of a stretch to see Cat People and Victim as equal parts of the same movie. Both deal with dark, quintessentially Lewtonian themes and subjects (death, fate, loneliness, suspense, shadows, neurosis, psychoanalysis, desperate women, ineffectual men, and dark streets). Moreover, both take pace in Greenwich Village. Most significant, both main characters are sexually ambiguous outcasts who struggle, ultimately unsuccessfully, to fit into a world of conventional normalcy, and do so in a ‘normal’ way. Then there's those two, near identical, dark fur coats that both Irena and Jacqueline wear.
[2] The Palladists’ ritualized meetings seem to consist mainly of afternoon teas and cocktail parties, all held at Mrs. Cortez’s spacious apartment. The one exception is the Jacqueline death watch in which the atmosphere takes on a literally deadly seriousness.
[3] Jean Brooks came by her insight into the character of Jacqueline honestly. Born in 1915 in Houston, Texas, she appeared as a supporting player in B pictures in the late 30s and early 40s. RKO picked her up in 1942, and she starred in six Falcon pictures with Tom Conway in addition to three Lewton films. But she struggled with alcoholism, and there were incidents of public drunkenness and disheveled appearance. In 1946 RKO dropped her from their roster. Her last movie was the World War II potboiler Women in the Night. The folks who made this film must have been impressed by the Jacqueline character - and Jean Brooks's inimitable take on the role - as she retains much the same black-drenched look and mysterious persona. The same sexual inclinations, too: yes, it's strongly implied she has a lesbian relationship with Frau Thaler (Bernadene Hayes), who bears a striking resemblance to Jacqueline's love interest Frances in Victim. Interesting that Women in the Night came out in 1948, only five years after Victim, and already the Jacqueline look - and personality - as embodied in the form of Jean Brooks, was beginning to attain cult status.
In any case, by the end of the decade her relatively brief career as a film actress was over. In the 1950s she disappeared from public life, eventually moving to San Francisco, where she worked in the classified department at the Examiner newspaper. She died of complications from alcoholism and malnutrition on Nov 25, 1963, at Kaiser Hospital in Richmond, California, at the age of forty-seven, largely forgotten.
[4] The overtones appear as early as the first scene, in which we meet Miss Loughwood, headmistress of the Catholic school Mary attends, and her assistant Miss Gilchrist. We don’t see these two characters again, but their cozy relationship anticipates much of what follows vis-à-vis the film’s female characters. Miss Gilchrist takes Mary aside and tells her to have courage, that one must have courage to live in the world. Some commentators read this as a coded subtextual message.
[5] William Mann, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969, Viking, pp. 208-09.
[6] There’s the two Satanists Mrs. Cortez and Mrs. Redi, but no Mr. Redi or Mr. Cortez. Both Mrs. Redi and Mrs. Cortez are middle aged, thus the husbands are probably too old to be away fighting the war. Do the husbands not approve? Do they even know? Are the two ladies widowed? Divorced?
Several commentators mistakenly identify Mrs. Redi as being played by Evelyn Brent, a sensible error since Miss Brent’s name appears high in the credits and Mrs. Redi is an important character in Seventh Victim. Actually Mrs. Redi is played, brilliantly so, by Mary Newton, who goes uncredited while Evelyn Brent takes the fairly peripheral character of Mrs. Cortez.
The credits for the Lewton films have always been a little dodgy: sometimes actors who play major characters aren’t credited at all and conversely some performers who receive high billing play roles of relative unimportance. An example is Jack Holt, who gets a high billing (fourth?) in Cat People yet contributes what’s little more than a glorified cameo. Similarly, in I Walked with a Zombie, Jenny LeGon is given conspicuous (if low) billing in the credits even though she appears for at most a couple of minutes as a voodoo ceremonial dancer. The other dancers receive no credits, and neither do other, more substantial, characters in the film, such as the coachman (Clinton Roseman) or the voodoo priest (Jieno Moxzer). It seems name recognition and star power rather than actual importance in the story carried the day with the folks in top management, and even a purist like Lewton couldn’t change that reality.
[7] Judd is a study in contradictions. Apparently killed in Cat People by Irena in her panther form, he’s inexplicably reincarnated in Victim. At first he retains a vaguely sinister air, a carryover from the prior film perhaps. But as the film progresses, his good qualities are gradually revealed. Curiously, his lecherousness, which was his downfall in Cat People, isn’t a factor in Victim. His relationship with the Satanists is tenuous at best. We encounter him at one of their parties, where he seems in congenial mood, not so surprising as he’s more or less treated as their guest of honor. But later in the film he gives them quite a dressing down, improbably reciting passages from the Lord’s Prayer as he delivers a brief moralistic rant on the folly of their Satanic ways.
[8] Not so coincidentally, Robson served as editor on the first three, Tourneur-helmed, Lewton films, thus an immediate and direct window into the Tourneur style. Robson also edited the atmospheric thriller Journey Into Fear (1943), directed by Orson Welles protégé Norman Foster. The film has a subtle but undeniable Lewtonesque vibe.
