The Seventh Victim, a Val Lewton Production
1943, mid-war, Val Lewton continues his series, beginning with Cat People (1942), of low budget black and white horror films that will include I Walked With a Zombie, Curse of the Cat People, and the most sinister one, The Ghost Ship.
Kirk Douglas in The Bad and the Beautiful plays a director/producer based on Val Lewton. Kirk makes a popular low budget horror film utilizing shadows and suspense to great effect, kind of like Cat People, right? Lewton's artistry is not reflected in The Bad and the Beautiful; Douglas's Lewton is a go-getter, a climber, a man willing to compromise his principles, a fast-liver, the kind of man who'd toss Lana Turner in a swimming pool.
The Seventh Victim (1943), produced by Lewton and directed in a debut by Mark Robson (The Ghost Ship, Von Ryan's Express, Earthquake), shows Kim Hunter in her first movie searching for her sister (Jean Brooks), a spooky and spooked woman with a Cleopatra hairdo, walking around much of the time in a trance state. She's run afoul of Satanists. The rich club of demon worshippers is rather gently presented. None of them ever have chicken blood dripping down their exposed chests. No human sacrifice occurs, although they do want Jacqueline, Kim Hunter's sister, to drink a poisoned drink for having revealed to her psychiatrist (Hugh Beaumont) the secret of the group's existence.
Given the tame insular nature of these Satanists, why would anyone care that they exist? The Satanists take themselves very seriously, holding at arm's length, literally, the taking of a human life, so they make a drink that will kill the woman they want dead because she violated an important rule. They're a very self-important group of Satanists.
God does not exist, they say, but Tom Conway sets them straight in a recitation of the Lord's Prayer, surely the film's worst scene, because it gets preachy in the center of a movie that's otherwise chilled to the bone with atmospheric currents moving through it. Mist, someone following Jacqueline as she's led to her death, not by poison, but by the noose in the apartment she never lived in, but set up for just the purpose of her own suicide. Not at all weird. She really believes in the integrity of her Satanism club.
Kim Hunter, twenty-five years before she was the chimp scientist, Zira, in Planet of the Apes, is awfully cute in this movie. She has a bewildered look on her fresh face half the time, but she's determined to find out the truth about her missing sister. Tom Conway plays his usual smugness well. Hugh Beaumont, fourteen years before fathering Beaver Cleaver, seems and sounds exactly like Hugh Beaumont.
It's not a bad movie. It loses tenseness when it gets preachy in that one scene, a betrayal of the film's dicey subject matter. It wasn't often in the 1940s that Hollywood depicted Satanists. These look like they're Greenwich Village dinner party Left Wing fourth estate types. They don't wear cloaks, they don't chant. They guard their secrets. What could these secrets be? That Satan will provide material gain if you sign over your soul to him? That it feels really good to gain success and money and power without earning it?
That's what these Satanists are in The Seventh Victim: they're fat. Grown powerful and influential in each of their own spheres. Even someone in the innocuous-seeming business of a cosmetics line could be founding their wealth on intellectual theft or on piles of dead animals. Looking good and smelling good, this Satan-tainted person corrupts others, too. That's the insidiousness of this group, except that Robson and the scenarist don't present that information; I'm reading in.
The lead-up to the Satanists (disappointing as villains, though one of them is an elegant dame missing her left arm, a novel touch, considering that Satan may have asked for her arm instead of her soul) is the film's strongest section. The heroine, Kim, strangely, is abandoned near the movie's end, as we focus on Jacqueline's dilemma: the poisoned cup, or the noose.
Thus, does Jacqueline become the film's eponymous character. Which makes me wonder, Who are the other six victims? They're not mentioned, if I recall rightly. This is the kind of movie my father would've said doesn't make a lot of sense. I tend to agree.
Vic Neptune
1943, mid-war, Val Lewton continues his series, beginning with Cat People (1942), of low budget black and white horror films that will include I Walked With a Zombie, Curse of the Cat People, and the most sinister one, The Ghost Ship.
Kirk Douglas in The Bad and the Beautiful plays a director/producer based on Val Lewton. Kirk makes a popular low budget horror film utilizing shadows and suspense to great effect, kind of like Cat People, right? Lewton's artistry is not reflected in The Bad and the Beautiful; Douglas's Lewton is a go-getter, a climber, a man willing to compromise his principles, a fast-liver, the kind of man who'd toss Lana Turner in a swimming pool.
The Seventh Victim (1943), produced by Lewton and directed in a debut by Mark Robson (The Ghost Ship, Von Ryan's Express, Earthquake), shows Kim Hunter in her first movie searching for her sister (Jean Brooks), a spooky and spooked woman with a Cleopatra hairdo, walking around much of the time in a trance state. She's run afoul of Satanists. The rich club of demon worshippers is rather gently presented. None of them ever have chicken blood dripping down their exposed chests. No human sacrifice occurs, although they do want Jacqueline, Kim Hunter's sister, to drink a poisoned drink for having revealed to her psychiatrist (Hugh Beaumont) the secret of the group's existence.
Given the tame insular nature of these Satanists, why would anyone care that they exist? The Satanists take themselves very seriously, holding at arm's length, literally, the taking of a human life, so they make a drink that will kill the woman they want dead because she violated an important rule. They're a very self-important group of Satanists.
God does not exist, they say, but Tom Conway sets them straight in a recitation of the Lord's Prayer, surely the film's worst scene, because it gets preachy in the center of a movie that's otherwise chilled to the bone with atmospheric currents moving through it. Mist, someone following Jacqueline as she's led to her death, not by poison, but by the noose in the apartment she never lived in, but set up for just the purpose of her own suicide. Not at all weird. She really believes in the integrity of her Satanism club.
Kim Hunter, twenty-five years before she was the chimp scientist, Zira, in Planet of the Apes, is awfully cute in this movie. She has a bewildered look on her fresh face half the time, but she's determined to find out the truth about her missing sister. Tom Conway plays his usual smugness well. Hugh Beaumont, fourteen years before fathering Beaver Cleaver, seems and sounds exactly like Hugh Beaumont.
It's not a bad movie. It loses tenseness when it gets preachy in that one scene, a betrayal of the film's dicey subject matter. It wasn't often in the 1940s that Hollywood depicted Satanists. These look like they're Greenwich Village dinner party Left Wing fourth estate types. They don't wear cloaks, they don't chant. They guard their secrets. What could these secrets be? That Satan will provide material gain if you sign over your soul to him? That it feels really good to gain success and money and power without earning it?
That's what these Satanists are in The Seventh Victim: they're fat. Grown powerful and influential in each of their own spheres. Even someone in the innocuous-seeming business of a cosmetics line could be founding their wealth on intellectual theft or on piles of dead animals. Looking good and smelling good, this Satan-tainted person corrupts others, too. That's the insidiousness of this group, except that Robson and the scenarist don't present that information; I'm reading in.
The lead-up to the Satanists (disappointing as villains, though one of them is an elegant dame missing her left arm, a novel touch, considering that Satan may have asked for her arm instead of her soul) is the film's strongest section. The heroine, Kim, strangely, is abandoned near the movie's end, as we focus on Jacqueline's dilemma: the poisoned cup, or the noose.
Thus, does Jacqueline become the film's eponymous character. Which makes me wonder, Who are the other six victims? They're not mentioned, if I recall rightly. This is the kind of movie my father would've said doesn't make a lot of sense. I tend to agree.
Vic Neptune
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