The Seventh Victim: The Inner Darkness

It turns out that Dr. Judd has been treating Jacqueline, who is suffering on account of her association with the Palladists, a satanic cult she was introduced to by Mrs. Redi and La Sagesse employee Frances (Isabel Jewell). Judd has been hiding Jacqueline from the Palladists, and she (Jean Brooks) turns up briefly, looking dazed. Determined to stay in the city and see things through, Mary takes a job at a nursery school. Soon after, she is taking a shower in her apartment when Mrs. Redi suddenly looms on the other side of the curtain and tells her that Jacqueline is a murderess; she stabbed August. Jacqueline, confronted by Mary, Gregory, and Judd, admits to the deed, having thought August was an assassin sent by the Palladists. It seems that, because she consulted Judd and leaked the cult’s secrets to him, Jacqueline is considered a traitor by the cult, and so ordered to die—to commit suicide, because the group’s members are too pacifistic to carry out an execution themselves. They have dispatched six former Palladists thusly, hence the film’s title. Left alone in Mary’s apartment, Jacqueline is kidnapped by the group and commanded to drink from the poisoned chalice, but Frances, distressed, knocks it out of her hand. Jacqueline is allowed to leave, but she is pursued by an assassin, who nearly captures her. Finally Jacqueline makes it back—to that room above Dante, with its noose.

Lewton unaccountably cut three scenes that would have resolved a number of mysteries, the biggest one being how Mary becomes romantically linked with Gregory, Jacqueline’s husband, which not only breaks the Hays Code but remains entirely unexplained. “It would be easier if Jacqueline were dead,” Gregory tells Mary in a cut scene, although that wouldn’t really seem to help with the moral standards. Two other excised scenes, between Judd and the cultist Natalie Cortez (Evelyn Brent, who starred in three of Josef von Sternberg’s silents), tell the backstory of the Palladists and show Gregory accidentally revealing Jacqueline’s location, which leads to her kidnapping.

Those missing scenes aside, there remain any number of other loose threads. At the very start, when Mary is about to go off to New York, the headmistress’s assistant catches up with her to urge her not to come back—but neither she nor the school reappears, so we never know why. And why does the headmistress refer to Mrs. Redi scornfully as “that woman”? Why does Natalie Cortez have one arm? Why does Tom Conway seem to be reprising his same-name role from Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942), even though Dr. Judd dies in that picture? What is Jason Hoag (Erford Gage)—a poet who eats at Dante and attaches himself to half the later scenes—even doing there, except to be Mary’s romantic interest, which never happens? At least we know who the Palladists were: a hoax created by the French writer Léo Taxil in 1891 to undermine both the Freemasons (the Palladists were allegedly a satanic cult bred by Masonry) and the Catholic Church (which eagerly broadcast Taxil’s inventions to discredit the Freemasons).

But all the plot holes would be par for the course, considering that the original script was set in California and focused on a woman fleeing a serial killer; you wonder what the two scripts might have had in common. Lewton’s working pace, set by the studio, was unrelenting, and he was given titles in advance—some having almost nothing to do with the finished picture, as is the case with The Curse of the Cat People (1944). Despite all that, he aimed, as he once said, to deliver “an A picture in B time.” With the miracles he pulled off on shoestring budgets, his insistence on independence, his artistic instincts jousting with expediency, and his nurturing of directorial talents, Lewton was the direct ancestor of Roger Corman.

Despite having been shot entirely on sets in Los Angeles, The Seventh Victim is as much a New York picture as the similarly inclined Rosemary’s Baby, which was also shot on sets in LA but had the benefit of the Dakota apartment building for its exteriors. Both films set an ingenue down in the powerful and mysterious big city, which, living up to her apprehensions, houses unimaginable evil—in the form of a decorous satanic cult made up of senior citizens. The Seventh Victim is more specific in its minimally described but somehow subliminally vivid location: Greenwich Village, home of bohemians, eccentrics, and little Italian restaurants three steps down in the French basement. The minimalism of the settings makes them somehow ultrareal—the city streets, the subway station, the hallways and furnished rooms are all so obviously confected that they become somehow platonic.

The Village is also filled with queers, and there seems to be plenty of that going on between the cracks here, beginning with the headmistress and her assistant, who exude Lesbos even though they are on-screen only a minute. Mrs. Redi and Frances give off the same aroma, and everyone is obsessed with Jacqueline, who doesn’t display much personality but looks extraordinary, Louise Brooks overlaid on Simone Simon, a perfect round face with huge eyes set off by a Cleopatra hairdo with short bangs. And then there is the cult, a crowd of golden-years singletons who speak in the fluty mid-Atlantic accent that marked the educated classes before the middle of the twentieth century. They like bibelots and antique furniture—how could they not be queer? One of the volunteer detectives checks up on their current interests by seeing what they’ve taken out from the public library (a poignant detail), items that naturally come fromthe closed shelves. As the critic Geoffrey O’Brien observed, the actors almost seem to be under hypnosis, like the cast of Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass.