Devil... got bumped off my list so far, although I do like it. My rental store has a copy of
Tomorrow... but there are about four other films I
definitely want to see before the final list tomorrow, and I probably have time for two, so we'll see if it makes it.
And if anyone wants a last recommendation based out of the Archives, I just noticed Warner put out Gordon Wiles'
The Gangster this whole time and I didn't notice. I really loved the film when I saw it years ago, will probably rewatch it soon, but it might be worthwhile.
The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson, 1943)
Arguably the best of the Val Lewton films,
The Seventh Victim strikes me as something of an anomaly in the series. It represents both the logical conclusion to the first cycle of the films (the Jacques Tourneur films), as well as a sharp break to what came before. Whether it was the loss of Tourneur, allowing Lewton’s voice to come out clearer than before (disregarding the Lewton-Robson auteur debate, it certainly registers as one of the most deeply personal films of the 1940s), or from a desire to break free from his b-horror label (it was, after-all, meant to be his first A-picture, until he refused to budge on Robson), there seems to be a marked difference from the horror films that came before: it’s a darker, more personal, more philosophical film; more self-consciously grounded in classical literary and artistic allusions; practically eliminating the supernatural elements that defined his other films; and set in a modern, urban world that more resembles our own.
But it also builds on the previous films, particularly the two that came before. Some of its major evolutionary steps are already apparent in
The Leopard Man. While certainly a horror film, that film was itself based off a certifiably
noir novel:
Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich. There’s already a step away from the supernatural and towards the horrors of the real world, its proto-slasher narrative standing in sharp contrast to his other cat based films. And its premise also lays the groundwork for this film, its titular monster representing a death that lurks behind every corner, preying on the rich and poor alike at their most unsuspecting, striking those in the midst of pursuing life (food, romance, money).
I Walked with a Zombie has perhaps even greater parallels, representing a society born out of suffering, where death and hardship is ingrained in every fabric of life and culture, so that people ceremoniously cry at births and celebrate at funerals, and where this knowledge manifests itself in alternative religions (although that film is much more sympathetic and ambiguous towards Voodoo culture than
Victim is to Satanism). It’s also, like
Victim, a film of great ambiguity – both in relation to the horror genre, where an atmosphere of pervasive dread and intangible death substitutes for a lack of a true monster/antagonist (Who is the villain? Carre-Four? Paul? Jessica? Wesley?) – as well as to its abstracted narrative: a mystery to which, even at the end, we are only allowed small, sidelong glimpses, ultimately unable to completely comprehend or understand. That film’s Betsy Connell is a prototype for this film’s Mary, a young innocent who gains experience from her encounter with this previously unknown world. Jessica is equally an ancestor of the
Seventh Victim’s Jacqueline, a enigmatic woman who is in fact a walking dead, lost in world of darkness and oblivion, fixed with a similar somnambulistic stare, as if glimpsing at a frightening reality hiding right behind our own. But what
Zombie couched in supernatural otherness,
The Seventh Victim returns home, transporting the story from exotic San Sebastian to urban New York, from black “others” to white Americans, from romanticized Voodoo to deglamorized, homegrown occultism. And while it’s certainly a different film (it of course loses the thematic link to slavery and colonialism so important to
Zombie) it makes on thing clear: you don’t have to turn to zombies or witch doctors, neither ailuranthropes nor the ailuranthropic at heart, to find lurking, inescapable death and decay; it’s already present in the modern city.
This increased emphasis on the urban city is matched by a similarly decreased reliance on the supernatural. The shadow of
film noir hangs over the entirety of the Lewton cycle, bridging the divide between the horror film of the 1930s and the genuine
film noir of the post-war 1940s. Even then,
The Seventh Victim stands out in its etching of urban paranoia and existential dread. Certainly, it is not a textbook example; but how many
noirs before 1944 (the year of
Double Indemnity,
Laura,
Murder My Sweet,
Phantom Lady,
The Woman in the Window) truly are? The film noir and the horror film share a common lineage in the world of “low-taste”: b-production units and dime-store literature,
Weird Tales and
Black Mask, yet with both their cinematic roots largely leading back to German Expressionism. Many of the early
film noirs bear the traces of the horror film (namely
Stranger on the Third Floor and
Among the Living), and even after the watermark year of 1944, they often reached back into the horror film's goodie bag of the bizarre and grotesque: the soothsayers and psychics of
The Amazing Mr. X,
Night Has a Thousand Eyes and
Nightmare Alley; the grand guignol nightmares that permeate the genre from
Murder My Sweet to
Secret Beyond the Door; the psychotic killers of
Follow Me Quietly and
While the City Sleeps; its preoccupation with sadism and the subconcious. If not for the name on the production credit, one could wonder whether this film would even be labeled a horror film. Many people will point to the Satanists, but even this alone doesn’t create a clear distinction; the world of the hard-boiled has never been completely impervious to this arena, as Dashiel Hammet’s
The Dain Curse or Jonathan Latimer’s
Solomon’s Vineyard attest to: both focused on occult secret societies, both iconic pieces of
noir literature. All this makes sense:
noir is only a genre in hindsight, so examples are bound to be filled with cross-pollination. While they often share a thematic link, especially in regards to the macabre, the horror film always turns its internal anxieties into external threats: monsters or supernatural phenomena. The anxieties of
The Seventh Victim – the city as paranoid nighmarescape, the inescapable approach of death, loneliness and isolation, the meaninglessness of life, the dangerous allure of suicide – may overlap with the horror macabre, but here they remain abstract. The worst you can say about the Satanists are that they’re a symptom of these anxieties, not a complete embodiment of it… and by the end of the film, they seem victim to them as much as any of the sympathetic characters.
It’s a
sui generis film, certainly; but then again, which of the Val Lewton films weren’t? This is why a description of this film as an average no-budget horror film is so baffling. If film noir is only a respectable genre in hindsight - European critics finding art in the supposedly artless, looking at the mere genre films and b-movies of the Hollywood factories and discovering within them personal studies of a pessimistic and cynical post-war America - then
The Seventh Victim is a crowning achievement. Its b-movie plot, completely pulp in nature, is so ramshackle, so fractured, so conventionally unsatisfying, that it barely holds the material together as a commercial film, while its self-consciously poetic approach inch closer to “art film” than any of the other Lewton films. Yet, it is its substance, its dark and uncompromising meditation on modern spiritual breakdown, which holds it together; only Nick Ray’s
In a Lonely Place uses the
film noir genre to express and examine such deeply personal trauma. Yet, it still captures much of what later
film noirs would finesse into a recognizable genre. Its nightmare city – with its cold maze-like architecture, it’s ever lurking threat of violence, it’s increasing atomization and indifference, its tapestry of loneliness, sadness and perversity – is a dry run for the menacing urban wastelands that soon became the playground for noir. Isn't Mary search essentially that of the detective film? Is Jacqueline’s walk through the city any different from
Act of Violence’s Los Angeles or
Night and the City’s Soho? And are the Satanists really different a threat from your typical crime syndicate? The existential and spiritual crises of its protagonists are nothing more than the moral quandaries of the typical film noir unfettered. And the film’s
danse macabre, its simultaneous fear of dying and its obsessive drive towards it, is the full embodiment of film noir’s fatalistic spirit, from Frank Bigelow’s search for his own killer, to Jeff Bailey’s headlong rush into a police firing squad. In fact, considering his influence on his contemporaries, as well as the type of films made before and after it, it is perhaps not difficult to postulate this film as having a direct influence on a number of
film noirs that went into production in its wake, such as
Phantom Lady,
Murder My Sweet and
When Strangers Marry (and some critics have done just that). Or what of directors like Alberto Cavalcanti, Michael Powell and Carol Reed, all of whom were great admirers of the film, whose influence extends to their
British noirs.
Film noir would later pick up the pulp, burying its personal obsessions into a catalog of fedoraed detectives, deceptive beauties, and vicious hoods.
The Seventh Victim disregards the formalities, and brings those obsessions front and center. It’s the raw material of film noir undiluted, 90% pure. A shot of the stuff could kill you, and its not surprising that it was the first failure of the cycle; it’s only recently that it has begun to be recognized for the masterpiece that it is.
There are better appreciations out there for those who need more convincing. Edmung G. Bansak devotes a whole chapter to it in
Fearing the Dark. And the poet John Ashbery's appreciation of the film in his
Selected Prose is worth reading. There are some blog pieces for those who want further reading, such as Jen Winzships’
four-part scene-by-scene look at the film, or these from
Not Coming,
Only the Cinema and
Cailloux de Cinema. For my part, I will only give a few words to this strange and sorrowful masterpiece. The Lewton cycle was often fixated on doubles, and this film has one of the most elaborate, criss-crossing networks of them. Standing at the center is its most visible doubling: Mary and Jacqueline. Mary’s journey in the film is one from Innocence to Experience; from the sheltered security of youth, cloistered in a girls school (faint traces of the coming
Curse of the Cat People), to suddenly being thrust into the uncertainty and cruelty of adulthood, the urban city. “One must have courage to live in the world”, she is warned early on, and she is determined to do so. Her sister, Jacqueline, is at the other end of the spectrum, initiated with experience, to the point that the knowledge of coming death haunts her every waking moment. A pale, fragile face peeking out from a long jet-black coat and raven hair, her eyes are dazed, fixated on some point off-screen, as if seeing the all-consuming void that all the characters skirt around and ignore. It's perhaps not coincidental that the film begins entirely preoccupied with Mary, but by the end, fixes all its intention on Jacqueline; it’s a journey from one extreme of life to another.
Surrounding them is a cross-section of the damned, debased and defeated, the lost, lonely souls who call Greenwich Village home. Both
Zombie and
Leopard Man balanced an entire tapestry of characters that sometimes made those respective works border on an ensemble film; this is no exception. Like that later famous
noir adage, there are a million hard-luck stories in this naked city; here, we are witness to only a few. The “missing persons” scene makes this clear: we follow Mary into the Missing Person Bureau, but the camera tracks along the desks, catching glimpses of other smalls tragedies - a man looking for his sixteen year old daughter, an elderly lady searching for her husband – before joining her. Failure and despair is always poking through the film, from major to minor characters. From the opening, where the idyllic purity of the school is tarnished by the regretful, quietly suffering Ms. Gilchrist, earnestly warning Mary not to come back, to flee the confines of the school, and the stingy, joyless, sexless headmaster Mrs. Lowood. This pair even gets its double within the Palladists, in the equally stern and authoritarian Mrs. Redi, and the young, incongruously gentle coded-lesbian, Frances. In fact, there is a pallor of pity and a sense of unspoken personal frustration behind the supposed menace of the Palladists, best personified in the enigmatic one-armed woman (early Sternberg muse Evelyn Brent) who hauntingly lingers within the frame whenever the camera enters their den. Their amorality is matched by that of Tim Conway’s Dr. Judd, so sleazy and devious, he seemed able to con his way out of the fate he suffered in
Cat People. But this amorality seems to be rooted out of ennui and stagnation, as his comment about losing his vocation professes, and by the end, it seems he was courting the Palladists as much as protecting Jacqueline (and its implied that he is the “breach” the Palladists were worried about). Gregory, so rational and business-like, seems
respectable to a fault, with lingering questions of culpability (where was he during his wife’s downward spiral?) and selfishness (disregarding Jacqueline for her younger sister). There’s Irving August, Private Eye, who seems sketchy and underhanded at first, picking up clients at the Missing Persons Bureau, but who later helps Mary (out of sympathy? General concern? Loneliness?)… and has his one kind deed repaid with a knife in the chest. There’s Mimi, Jacqueline’s “neighbor”, young, once-beautiful, now slowly dying, hiding behind a locked door and trying to ward off death as long as possible. Even the sole happy characters of the film, Mr. and Mrs. Romari, have a need to keep Jason around to stay happy, constantly invoking him to make them laugh.
And then there’s Jason, perhaps the third largest character of the film. In a film loaded with doubles, he has several: August (as a kindly detective), Gregory (as a romantic suitor), Dr. Judd (as a man who’s lost his vocation), even Dante (a poet journeying through the underworld for the love of a Beatrice… or in this case, two Beatrices: both Mary and the former love he lost to Dr. Judd). But perhaps the most significant double may be Val Lewton himself. Strongly personal, the film mirrors Lewton’s own time in Greenwich Village, his artistic decline perhaps parallel to Lewton’s own time stuck writing film novelizations, or even his frustration as a b-unit horror producer. Frustrated in life and love, Jason seems to cling to art and poetry as his sole refuge from the sadness and loneliness of the modern world. And for a man able to make such a dark, uncompromising film, one wonders whether Lewton felt the same way (and for a film so preoccupied with death, the knowledge of both Lewton and Erford Gage’s early deaths sticks in the mind while watching).
This preoccupation with death is the sticking point for those who want to classify this film as horror. And certainly the film operates on the metaphysical fear of death. It has a sense for the macabre which, while not uncommon for horror films, is only indulged as fully in the rarest of film noirs (
They Made Me a Fugitive,
The Chase,
Nightmare Alley). It may not be supernatural, but it has that thick, humid atmosphere of doom that one identifies with the Lewton horror films. One may argue for it as a poetic horror film, but deprived of the supernatural, it’s one that borders on poetic realism. And just as poetic realism was the “mongrel whelp” of conflicting impulses like naturalism, impressionism and surrealism, so does
Victim lay bare the conflicting impulses that would soon be refined into the
film noir. And whether
film noir, horror film or poetic realist, it lays bare the central concern (man's central concern?) under them all: man’s metaphysical terror, both of an ever-nearing death, and a life of suffering that precedes it, and the way people ward off, transcend or succumb to it. With its fractured, fragmented narrative, it emphasizes the episode, vignette-like structure of the Lewton films, and these set-pieces are among his most poetic and philosophically preoccupied. Is there a more perfect symbol for our deepest fears, our inescapable mortality, both our instinctual drive to conquer it and to give in, than an unassuming door, in an unassuming boarding-house, behind which lies an empty room, bare but for a gilt chair over which hangs a noose? Mary’s subway ride is a Sisyphean task of repetition back and forth across the city, where in her fear and terror she realizes that, among the dense population of the city, she is fundamentally alone. When she goads August to walk down the dark hallway, it is a journey into metaphysical darkness as much as literal: he enters into the same world of darkness and oblivion that Jacqueline lives in, behind a locked door much like that of the boardinghouse. It is only right that by entering this world, he meets both Jacqueline and death. This movie is littered with staircases, always representing contrast and transition, starting with the opening
Amberson staircase, where Mary is already moving against the current of youth and innocence, to the final chilling scene, capping one of the famed Lewton walks, where Jacqueline meets another of her doubles.
This final walk may be the greatest of those constructed by Val Lewton. Not only is it a great example of Lewton refining his art, but it’s a logical culmination to a film about those who run to and from death. It’s not just another walk through a dark city: it is a walk through the isolation and despair of
the modern city in general, it is a journey through Jacqueline’s own subjective worldview, and a final summation of all that came before in the film. Jacqueline in her obsession with death, has jumped from one sensation to the next, searching for any meaningful bond that could conquer her death instinct: her familial bond with her sister, prosperity with her own cosmetic company, romance – both respectable (with her marriage to Gregory) and
l’amour fou (Dr. Judd, Frances), she’s clung to religions, both mainstream (the school leads us to believe this) and esoteric (the Palladists). Yet, despite this all, she can’t escape the pull of death. Likewise, the film chronicles the way other people construct their own systems of meaning to ward off their own metaphysical and existential fear – romance, religion, art, secret societies, work, drink and merriment, friendship – and this walk is as much a journey through their world as it is hers. In her walk, she comes across a pair of lovers – mirroring the romantic frustration that envelopes the film. She faces the same indifference and callousness from the crowd that Mary met on the subway, and which in fact, is at the root at all the characters’ isolation. She comes across a door to a theater, locked to her – the world of art and poetry which Jason lives in, but which she is unable to find meaning in. She is eventually saved and is swept up in the crowd, but loses them again, stopped short in front of a bardoor – a world where drink and revelry stands in for happiness, but to which she finds no joy. And after this, all the while escaping a knife-wielding killer, she ultimately escapes death only to run to it. She has spent to film trying to conquer death, telling herself she is not afraid of it, but only after finding that the pleasures of the world are no match in the face of it, does she give in. There she meets Mimi, frail, sick, dying, her double, her opposite. Jacqueline runs to death, Mimi hides from it. Jacqueline gives in to it, Mimi fights against it. Both choices are a suicide in their own right, but with its own negative and positive implications
As Jacqueline and Mimi enter their rooms, but before they commit to their choices, the film (almost awkwardly) cuts away for two scenes involving the other characters. While some may see shoehorning in this, a further example of its fractured narrative, a last-minute attempt to tie-up loose-ends, I think their placement is more important. Suspended as they are, between Jacqueline’s decision to commit suicide and the suicide itself, the two scenes are absolutely connected to its grim conclusion. Jacqueline has decided to embrace death, but here we cut away to those still struggling to live. She has given into oblivion and nihilism, but here we find those still trying to find meaning and structure in the world. She has decided to shuffle off her mortal coil, while the others (for the time being) will live on. Without these scenes, the film would be too-dark, almost destructive in its worldview. If they happened after, or if it stuck with its original ending, simultaneously more upbeat about Mary and Gregory, more downbeat about Jason, they may have seemed too much like sugarcoating. But as it is, there locations are as ambiguous as the scenes themselves, offering a glimmer of hope within the characters, but still remaining uncertain.
In the first of these scenes, Judd and Jason confront the Palladists, and recite the Lord’s Prayer to them. Perhaps the scene may seem hokey to some, but that is too miss the ambiguity and irony that inflects the scene. Perhaps it seems preachy that the two are able to talk down the menacing Palladists with such simple scripture, but I think the undercutting of the Palladists is crucial: they are not the actual threat of the film, and are in final summation as pitiful and sad as any of the protagonists, clinging to their secret society almost out of desperation ("a pathetic joke"). Likewise, the moralizing seems suspect in view of several red flags: 1) The film after all ends not with a prayer but with a suicide. 2) This is a film that opens, ominously, with a girl leaving a religious school (and religion), with no sign of coming back, and in several points, the Palladists and Highcliffe Academy are linked in unflattering ways. 3) The prayer is delivered by Dr. Judd, perhaps, the most amoral character in the whole film (it was said by Jason in the script, so it must have been a conscious decision). Nonetheless, while its view of religion may be bleak, there is still some hope here, both in Judd’s disavowal of the Satanists he was originally courting, as well as the possibility of a friendship between him and Jason. The next scene is similarly ambiguous. It is also one which is most affected by the lack of knowledge of Jacqueline’s whereabouts. Mary and Gregory confess their love for each other, but because of Jacqueline, Mary makes a stand against it. It’s a scene the offers a glimmer of hope for Mary and Gregory with love, yet with an underside in regards to the unresolved marriage between Gregory and Jacqueline. Perhaps Jacqueline’s death will draw them together, perhaps it will pull them apart. And would a romance with the repressed, selfish Gregory even be ideal? The film leaves this up in the air, fitting for a film about our collective uncertainty.
Art? Friendship? Prayers? Romance? They flash before the film as if in front of Jacqueline’s eyes, and all these pleasures become like yesterday. Mimi returns from her door, dressed up for one last hurrah that will probably kill her. As she passes Jacqueline’s door, she pauses as she’s hear a sharp thud – the chair is kicked back, the rope snaps – but then walks on. Of all the stairway meetings, this is the most significant, the seizing of life versus the embrace of death, Thanatos against Eros. Death haunts both of them, but each chooses a different philosophy. Death in fact haunts everyone here, and the way they struggle and come to terms with is the film’s subject. Death haunts the film noir, in fact: some people try to escape it with avarice or lust, others turn to criminality to get the upper hand on their fates, other take moral stand and try to find redemption - and meaning - through it. In all instances, people are trying to make sense and find peace in a world gone mad, and which has perhaps always been so. For this we go through a journey through the modern city, one that is oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent and cruel, but especially, dark. Hollywood films come no darker. If this isn’t a
film noir, then I don’t know if any film is worthy of the title.