A Film Canon

 

 

Despite a frequently clumsy, discursive script, and an unnecessarily complicated plot, The Seventh Victim contains some of the most brilliant moments in producer Val Lewton's career, taking two of his proclivities to their poetic conclusion. On the one hand, his fascination with the death-drive finds expression in two contemplative, haunting tableaux, both of which revolve around Jacqueline Gibson (Jean Brooks), whose sister, Mary (Kim Hunter), seeks her out after her sudden disappearance, and rumoured involvement with a Satanic cult. The first takes the form of a room that Jacqueline rents out for the purpose of contemplating death herself, furnished with only a noose and a chair; the second emerges from the cult's insistence that Jacqueline commit suicide for disclosing their secrets, and concomitant presentation of a glass of poison that becomes as much an object of contemplation as the room, their significance fused in the unnerving conclusion - one of few, at the time, whose score ended in a minor key. On the other hand, Lewton's skill at conveying treacherous, darkened passage is generalised to an entire cityscape, such that the area of Greenwich Village within which the narrative takes place is suffused with the pursuant gaze of the cult, and, more generally, their understated rationality, as if to translate the prioritisation of atmosphere over special effects directly into characterisation.