Film review: The Seventh Victim (1943)

How is this film not a cult classic?  We watched it as part of the Criterion Channel's Val Lewton collection, having already seen the two most famous films in that set, the fantastic Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie.  Both of those are justly famous as absolutely gorgeous and dream-like horror films, directed by Jacques Tourneur (Val Lewton was the producer) who also directed perhaps the quintessential film noir, Out of the Past (with Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas, but more importantly, Jane Greer).  Anyway, as this one was not directed by Tourneur, I wasn't expecting that much.  How wrong I was - it is just as beautifully shot (Lewton is famous for the high contrast and inky shadows in his films) and if anything, even more of a fever dream than I Walked with a Zombie (which is a retelling of Jane Eyre in the Caribbean).  It should be required viewing in any existentialism class - to quote the Criterion Channel's blurb: "Asked to summarize the film’s shockingly bleak message, producer Val Lewton offered, “Death is good.”"
It begins in a girl's boarding school, amid the sound of the conjugation of Latin verbs.  One of the girls, who is supposed to be somewhere from 16 to 18, I think, is our heroine, Mary Gibson, played by Kim Hunter (David Niven's love interest in A Matter of Life and Death), who is informed that her sister Jacqueline, her sole surviving relative and the person who has been paying her school bills, has not done so and is unreachable.  The apparently kindly headmistress offers to take Mary on as a teacher's assistant, but she wants to go and find her sister. Again the headmistress offers to pay for her trip and says she can come back at any time.  Seems very congenial, but the headmistress's assistant follows Mary out of the room and urgently instructs her never to return, because she herself had the chance to get away but didn't and regrets it.  At this we hear the headmistress calling sternly for her.  Thus a mood of unease and dread is set which is maintained throughout this film's short but intense duration.  In fact, it is positively (David) Lynchian in how that mood is exacerbated by strange characters and odd unexplained moments, particularly in the early going before too much is explained.  Some examples: Mary discovers that Jacqueline has rented a room above an Italian restaurant, but doesn't use it, and when they jimmy it open they find that all it contains is a noose hanging above a chair.  Mary gets help from a very small private eye, who tells her that one room is kept locked in the cosmetics business that Jacqueline used to run, but that is now run by the stern Mrs Redi (who claims that she bought it from Jacqueline, but the private eye has discovered Jacqueline deeded it to her for free), and when they break into the building to look in there, both are creeped out by the dark corridor it is at the end of, and Mary sends the PI down alone.  Of course when he staggers back he has been stabbed and dies in a pool of blood at her feet.  She runs away in horror and has been circling a line on the subway for hours when three men get into her carriage.  Two of them are holding up the third, who appears to be drunk, but then his hat falls off... and it's the dead PI! Throw in actual devil-worshippers, a creepy psychiatrist (played by George Sanders' brother, who sounds very similar and is a staple of most Val Lewton films), a poet, a dying tubercular neighbor (who wants to live, unlike the healthy Jacqueline), a one-armed woman, a midget news vendor and the husband Mary didn't know Jacqueline had, and you've got a heady brew.  As I've said, it loses some of its surreal impact when they try to tie the ends together, and there's a scene where the devil-worshippers are shamed by quoting from the Lord's Prayer that's pretty corny, but the ending is a real kicker (pun intended).  Well worth anybody's time, especially an afficianado of ornate 40s hairstyles.  Jacqueline (when we finally meet her) has one of the more unfortunate ones, but I swear one of the devil-worshippers has the exact 'do that Rachael (Sean Young) has in Blade Runner.
(Side note: the film has no relation to the excellent Robert Scheckley short story Seventh Victim, which, coincidentally, I read recently.  Other side note: I first saw Cat People as an impressionable teenager, in a house being rented by my future step-family because their actual one had burnt down.  It was part of a double bill with the egregious Zoltan: Hound of Dracula, (also known much more prosaically as Dracula's Dog.  The BBC was having a series where they ran a B&W horror movie before a color one, and you can see the theme in this one, but it was a sacrilegious pairing.  There are two classic scenes in Cat People that influenced all horror films to come.)