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derspatchel wasn't feeling well, so tonight I went to The Seventh Victim (1943) at the HFA alone. This was probably the most effective and the worst possible way I could have seen it.I don't know that I have the wherewithal to do it justice tonight. It's an alienating, unwieldy, and haunting film. The clipped pacing of some scenes and the haste with which plotlines switch off suggest some heavy-handed editing after the fact; given how smoothly and spellbindingly others unfold, I would love to know what was left on the cutting room floor and whether it was Lewton's choice or the studio's. He won a major battle against the Production Code with the film ending as darkly and absolutely as it does, so maybe he had to sacrifice some lesser darlings along the way. The emotional effect, nonetheless, is seamless: moody and fatalistic, full of shadows and half-told stories. This is a film in which a coven of Satanists operates out of a penthouse apartment in Greenwich Village and the most diabolical thing we see them do is turn an exhausted, severely depressed person out onto the nighttime streets alone. Make no mistake, that's a level of cruelty the helpful neighbors of Rosemary's Baby (1968) only wish they could attain. The Seventh Victim teaches in no uncertain terms that even the strongest love and the best efforts can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved—or whose idea of salvation is very different than your own.
Ostensibly the movie is a detective story. Turned out of her expensive, faintly Gothic girls' school with the news that her older sister hasn't paid her tuition or even answered the phone in six months, Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter, in her first screen role) comes to New York City to find the glamorous, mysterious Jacqueline, last seen at the head of a successful cosmetics company. She is very young, gravely implacable. She interviews the former manager of the plant, eats at an Italian restaurant called Dante's, takes a room in her sister's building while she plans her next move. The dialogue is just the right side of naturalistic, the lighting and shadow-slants point toward noir; really we're watching a fairy tale. Mary with her schoolgirl skirts and her face still childishly curved is an Angela Carter innocent making her way through the dark woods of Manhattan, shielded by the magic circle of her own ignorance, with various figures appearing to help or hinder her. In keeping with the film's drifting, existential mood, however, all her helpers are in some way failed or flawed. Sharp-faced (uncredited) Lou Lubin is the first to falter as "Irving August, private investigator," a small-time skip-tracer who tries to chisel fifty bucks out of Mary's anxiety before a combination of pity and contrariness—he's warned off the case by a better-heeled competitor—moves him to offer his services for free. It gets him killed in the dark, when Mary refuses to go down a long, shadowed hallway before him. He's the weaker character, reluctantly shamed forward like a kid outside a spook house; he comes back collapsing in his own blood. By then we've met Jason (Erford Gage), an unsuccessful poet and patron of Dante's; he takes the same table every time, the one underneath the mural that lets him sit "at the feet of Dante." With his clowning bad Italian and his overblown metaphors, he's easy to write off as a wannabe, until we learn he's something much more devastating: a has-been. New York's answer to James Mortmain, he wrote one work of burning modernist genius that won him the expectant admiration of the literary world and then nothing for the next ten years. He's attracted to Mary almost at once, mocking himself for it; he's brave enough to confront, for her sake, the underworld that Jacqueline disappeared into, but his face tightens all too revealingly at the bland mention of his "wonderful first book." Hugh Beaumont is unfortunately cardboardier than one would wish as Gregory Ward, the lawyer who assists Mary in her quest and gradually falls for her as well, but the script helps him out; he's the most successful of the characters, the most conventionally handsome and the most self-assured, but he lies to Mary even as she begins to reciprocate his affections, concealing until long after the point where she could have learned painlessly the fact that he's Jacqueline's husband. And most ambiguous of all, we have Tom Conway, reprising some parallel-universe version of Cat People (1942)'s Dr. Judd, Worst Psychiatrist Ever—Jacqueline's doctor and the latest of her lovers, a smooth-mannered, acid-tongued performance of languid cynicism and elegant sleaze. His first act onscreen is to refuse an appeal for professional help, his second to extort money from Ward. Gesturing Mary to a choice of staircases, he claims to prefer "the left—the sinister side." He's not the Devil, though—in fact, the prospect of being left alone to face genuine Satanists discomposes him to the point of a graceless exit.
I got to the last of these sketches before realizing that there is something in the banding of this oddball trio around Mary that sounds like The Wizard of Oz, albeit a sort of hardboiled remix where the dynamic among Dorothy's companions is constantly shifting, driven as much by their own insecurities and conflicting interests as by the wish to help her. All the same, they do help, and their aid—freely given, however incomplete or compromised—is one of the film's fragile, stubbornly flickering arguments against the kind of indifferent yielding to evil practiced by the Palladists, who seem to have defaulted to the Devil in the apparent absence of God. (It feels like a characteristic Lewton touch that it doesn't matter whether this universe has a Devil. I snorted at the quoting of the Lord's Prayer late in the film, but on reflection I acknowledge that it provides a subtle, necessary moment of ambiguity: it throws the coven off balance either because they have sworn themselves to Satan and therefore cannot bear God's words or because, having just condemned one of their own to death for betrayal, they are momentarily abashed by the line about as we forgive those who trespass against us. Either way, it is not the clarion moment of Peter Cushing holding off Dracula with nothing more than a makeshift cross and terrified resolve; very little is defeated in this film, although a few small things might be won. The credits roll before we can be sure.) The other is neither a nihilistic or a pessimistic statement, though I understand how the critics got there. "Your sister had a feeling about life," Ward tells Mary, "that it wasn't worth living unless one could end it." Any celebration of free will, The Seventh Victim reminds us, includes recognizing the right to choose one's own death, not be driven willy-nilly to it. We're all the consumptive neighbor in her glittering evening dress, heading out for one last night on the town. She's getting there faster than most of us, but we all want to enjoy the ride. And some of us want it to stop. On our own terms. Remember the film's first shot, zooming out from a stained-glass setting of John Donne's Holy Sonnet 1: I runne to death, and death meets me as fast . . .
I haven't described Jacqueline at all. There's a reason for that.
It's a quarter to three; I'm going to shower. I think the nicest thing I can say about The Seventh Victim is that it left me feeling profoundly alone, walking home in the rain at a quarter to nine at night. I couldn't talk about it with anybody; I hadn't even organized my own thoughts by the time I got home, where the rooms were warm and brightly lit and occupied by somebody who had not shared the night-journey of the last hour and a half. I could explain, but I couldn't communicate. I looked up actors' names on IMDb and wrote this. Val Lewton was an astonishing filmmaker, and I understand why this one's a legend. Watch it at the wolf-hour and you might never get out. And all my pleasures are like yesterday.
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Whew.
Strange and beautifully observed.
Nine
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Thank you. See further discussion with
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I definitely want your full thoughts about Jacqueline, though.
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See, I didn't think her innocence had survived the story. At the outset she's protected by her inability to grasp the enormity and hopelessness of what she's up against (which is not the power of Satan, but the impossibility of keeping another person alive), but that same unknowingness is exactly what gets August killed: she's scared of the dark hallway in La Sagesse, but she doesn't really believe there could be something murderous as opposed to upsetting at the end of it, so she sends him into those shadows and straight onto Jaqueline's scissors. And she acknowledges responsibility for it: "He was a kind little man in his way—and I made him go down that hall into the darkness. I made him do it." Jacqueline is the one who'd stand trial, but Mary knows they killed him between them. By the end, I think she gets some of what is driving Jacqueline—Ward in their last scene together is still trying to talk about their future together, some far-off pipe dream when Jacqueline "is well again," and Mary is the one to close that conversation down. She doesn't foresee the suicide, but she understands that Jacqueline will never be what people like Gregory Ward consider "well." And she won't take anything away from her sister that might provide her with happiness. That's how we know Mary is still partly that innocent who doesn't know how to shiver, because Ward isn't happiness for Jacqueline, any more than La Sagesse or the Palladists were. But not entirely. She's left knowing what she wants: Ward, who belongs to her sister. If that kind of recognition isn't loss of innocence, what is?
(I mean, obviously the film thinks that once the news breaks of Jacqueline's death, Ward and Mary will get together like that now that their excuse for self-renunciation is gone, but I'm a lot more skeptical. Or possibly just hopeful, because I think I agree with you that marrying Ward would render her a child-in-perpetuity, no matter what ground she managed to gain since leaving Highcliffe—Ward loves that enchanting vacancy, wide-eyed, uncomplex, and he lied to her once to keep her from looking at him differently. Jason at least had the honesty to recognize that he'd make her a bad husband and never even bring it up.)
I have overrun the comments limit; continued below.
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So the thing I find most interesting about Jacqueline is that we're led to imagine she joined the Palladists out of sensationalism, or depravity, or ennui, any of the usual reasons that wealthy, discontented people find to open negotiations with the Devil. She was trying to be life-affirming. The film is almost not even an allegory about depression—it feels in keeping with the rules of metaphor that the Palladists can't attack Jacqueline directly, they can only try to talk her into taking her own life, but even without them Jacqueline has never been happy. "And you don't want to die . . . I've always wanted to die. Always." Her entire life has been a search for reasons to stay alive, of which Satanism was just the latest. Being a successful businesswoman wasn't enough. Neither was marrying Ward, or taking lovers like Judd or Frances—even her little sister, her only other family, Mary, wasn't enough. No other person ever is. So I keep seeing the final scene from split angles. It's horribly upsetting that Jacqueline kills herself, especially with Mary and Ward waiting for her in the next room, especially with the defiant, dying neighbor not even understanding what she hears as she sweeps down the stairs to enjoy the little time she has left. That's the ultimate nightmare of the big city, eight million people around you and no one even knows. On the other hand, knowing she's facing murder charges for the death of August, knowing the Palladists will come after her again, knowing it's not like she was ever happy before any of these things happened, she chooses to go out on her own terms, with the noose she bought to remind herself that she was allowed to appreciate life now that she could leave it any time she liked. I can't argue with her right to do it. I can't even argue that it seems to make her happier than staying alive (even if I wonder if she might have chosen differently if she hadn't met with Mimi on the stairs). It's still a gut-punch of an ending and I wasn't expecting it.
I'm just amazed by the very existence, especially in 1943, of a movie full of flawed, frequently unhappy characters who are neither punished for it nor rescued at the end. There's a cautious hope in Jason's beginning to write again, but the story cuts off before we hear what an editor thinks of the manuscript; we know only that Judd has promised to show it to his publishers. We learn that Judd is capable of kind acts as well as jaded opportunism, but it doesn't excuse his earlier behavior, nor do we have any reason to think that altruism and humility will come to define him from now on. (Which is as it should be. I love that he never joined the Palladists; he was just a sort of social hanger-on. Presumably committing to Satanism, as to any other ideal, would have taken a depth of conviction he just can't be bothered to feel.) Even Mary only affirms her love for Ward by denying it, placing Jacqueline between them: it might make her a good person, but it certainly doesn't make her happy. And Jacqueline dies and it isn't retribution for trying on devil-worship or killing a man, it's because in the long run nothing could ever have prevented her. Seriously, I don't know how this film ever got made. I'm really glad it did.
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You're very welcome. I'd love for Lewton's films to receive some kind of Criterion treatment, but until then I'll just be happy everything's on DVD.
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I would like to watch The Seventh Victim and Rosemary's Baby back to back sometime.
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Thank you.
I would like to watch The Seventh Victim and Rosemary's Baby back to back sometime.
Please report if you do! I can't imagine one wasn't a direct influence on the other. (I saw Rosemary's Baby first.)
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the lighting and shadow-slants point toward noir; really we're watching a fairy tale. --still liking what I'm hearing.
he lies to Mary even as she begins to reciprocate his affections, concealing until long after the point where she could have learned painlessly the fact that he's Jacqueline's husband. --ughh, Hollywood betrayal. What is his excuse for not revealing this earlier?
very little is defeated in this film, although a few small things might be won. --poetry. It could be sung by Anaïs Mitchell or Leonard Cohen.
Watch it at the wolf-hour and you might never get out. Yipe. I can believe it, reading what you write of your own reaction.
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He doesn't have one! A third party blurts it out! He claims not to have said anything because if Jacqueline never told her sister she was married, then it wasn't his place to spill the beans, but this is a pretty semantic argument considering neither of them knows at that point if Jacqueline is even alive.
(I wasn't very impressed by Gregory Ward.)
--poetry. It could be sung by Anaïs Mitchell or Leonard Cohen.
It was a very poetic film.