The 7th Victim
One of the things that is so striking about Val Lewton’s famous supernatural thrillers from the early/mid ’40s is that many of them center around female characters. I wouldn’t say “strong” female characters, in the modern way we understand that phrase, but they are strong in how much depth and intrigue they contain. “Cat People” is the more famous example of Lewton’s strategy, but Mark Robson’s “The 7th Victim” might be a more complicated one, even if it doesn’t always exert the same hold as “Cat People.”
Starring in her first role is Kim Hunter, from “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Planet of the Apes,” as she plays Mary Gibson, a schoolgirl who is called into the headmaster’s office one day with some distressing news. Her only family, her sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks), is missing, and Mary is behind on her tuition to the school. They give her leave of her studies as she goes to New York to look for her, and the search grows ever complicated as she follows the breadcrumbs to a shady doctor, and a group of satanic worshippers. The world grows a lot darker for Mary, who is not sure what to make of her sister as she goes on.
The screenplay is by Charles O’Neal and DeWitt Bodeen, the latter of whom wrote “Cat People,” which explains the curious choice of Robson and Lewton’s film to include Tom Conway’s Dr. Louis Judd from that film. He was the psychiatrist who saw Irena in that film, and it makes one curious is Lewton had in mind the potential of a shared universe for these films. Judd is retired from psychiatry in this film, and no reference is made to Jacques Tourneur’s classic, but it makes you wonder if Lewton had the same type of thing in mind we’re seeing with the “Conjuring” franchise and its spin-offs 75 years earlier. It’s fascinating to watch the way Lewton and his filmmakers built each film, and is looking to explore different ideas in terms of genre on a budget.
The reason a movie like “The 7th Victim” works as well as it does, and I would put it in the middle tier of Lewton’s horror collection, is because it is rooted in character and ideas than jump scares, although there are definitely creepy moments Lewton and his directors will take advantage of, like a person familiar with Jacqueline going into a dark room to try and find her for Mary, only to come out dead. To the larger point of “Victim’s” success, though, is the central performance by Kim Hunter, who displayed the same level of intelligence, warmth and strength here that would be a hallmark of her later performances. She makes Mary’s descent into a dark part of humanity palpable in this intriguing mystery.
