The Seventh Victim is the 4th film that Val Lewton made for RKO Pictures in the 1940s. Even though he was the Producer of these films he actually wrote a final, uncredited, draft of the script before shooting. His first three films did so well that the studio decided that they would break up the team of Producer Lewton and Director Jacques Tourneur, figuring they could make more money out of them working on separate pictures. They were both promised the chance to work on A pictures for their next projects. Tourneur's next picture would be Days Of Glory with Gregory Peck. I haven't seen most of Tourneur's films after the three he did with Val Lewton, many are stories I'm not as interested in, but I did recently see Out Of The Past with Robert Mitchum and I really enjoyed that. I'd seen Night Of The Demon and I just watched Cool And Lam on YouTube. The former is an average horror movie that I enjoyed well enough and the latter is a 1958 TV pilot for an adaptation of the Donald Lam and Bertha Cool novels by Earl Stanley Gardner. I'd been a big fan of the characters though I haven't read the series in 20 odd years. I have a big box of Gardner's books to read and re-read at some time in the future. I hadn't ever heard of the pilot before. It was an interesting adaptation.
Lewton got offered a film and he wanted editor Mark Robson to be the director of the film. Robson had been the editor of the first three RKO films that Lewton produced. The studio said no way, Robson had also been an editor on Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, and the taint of those money losing films was hard to shake. The studio told Lewton that he could lose Robson or go back to B pictures. Lewton chose to stand by Robson and he stayed with the Horror Unit. Robson got his chance to direct The Seventh Victim and he did a great job. Between the script by Charles O'Neal and DeWitt Bodeen. Robson's directing and Lewton's production they turned in a nice tight film. Robson would direct four more pictures for Lewton and continue to direct until 1979. That was the year he passed away.
It was the first film role for Kim Hunter, she plays a young woman named Mary, who's informed that her sister Jacqueline has stopped paying her boarding school tuition. That's Kim on the right in the picture above. The other woman is Jean Brooks who plays Jacqueline. Mary travels to New York to look for her sister. She meets Jacqueline's husband, played by Hugh Beaumont, a poet, played by Erford Gage, and Jacqueline's psychiatrist, played by Tom Conway. Turns out Jacqueline was a member of a Satanic cult called the Palladists. They have a strict rule, reveal the cult and they will kill you, so Jacqueline went into hiding when they found out she told Tom Conway about the cult.
That's some of the cult, they aren't nearly as much fun as the LEGO cult club I belong to. They claim to be a pacifist group so they try forcing Jacqueline to kill herself. It doesn't work so they hire a hit man to kill her. He fails. By the end of the film Jacqueline is so tired, confused and depressed that she does the job herself. Poor sister Mary has a fearful time, the cult threatens her while she's looking for her sister. The private eye she hires is murdered, some strange men spirit the body away, then she finds out it was her sister who killed the PI. Her world comes tumbling down and the only ray of sunshine is a budding romance with Hugh Beaumont. The only thing stopping them from hooking up is Mary's sister and she's exits stage left at the end of the picture. The RKO didn't care for the picture. The dark subject mater, suicide and devil worshippers, didn't appeal to the execs. The critics didn't care much for it but over time the movie has come to be seen in a different light.
There's an interesting commentary by Steve Haberman that's well worth listening to. It fills in a lot of backstory about the cast, crew and production. Also on this disc is a 53 minute documentary called Shadows In The Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy which has a lot of interviews with people talking about the importance of Val Lewton's films. There are film directors: Guillermo DelToro, William Friedkin, Joe Dante, John Landis and George Romero, writers: Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman and Ramsey Campbell, film historians: Steve Haberman, Stephen Jones and Kim Newman. That was worth watching also.
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