cult film freak: KIM HUNTER IN VAL LEWTON'S GOTHIC NOIR 'THE SEVENTH VICTIM'

Title: THE SEVENTH VICTIM Year: 1943 Rating: ****

Following producer Val Lewton's exploitation horrors CAT PEOPLE, THE LEOPARD MAN and I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE directed by Jacques Tourneur, where the titles alone helped fill theaters, THE SEVENTH VICTIM, by another Lewton stock auteur, Mark Robson, is the most ambiguous and enigmatic yet made very little money...

And unlike a straight mystery, what's buried in the investigative plot-line is revealed halfway through after young Kim Hunter trades her safe chilly girl's school teaching job for the big, dark, looming city, searching for her older sister, the highly-regarded owner of a lucrative cosmetics company, who suddenly vanished...

Kim Hunter in THE SEVENTH VICTIM

Providing that Noir device of various locations with last names dropped in a convoluted maze: here involving a Satanic cult that ironically consists of sophisticated intellectuals (that later influenced ROSEMARY'S BABY)....

Meanwhile when sis turns up... miraculously alive yet stone-cold-hypnotic... the trail that leads to her whereabouts — from a suspenseful subway station to an affable restaurant-hangout — seemed an impossible task, providing a similarly cursed and haunted purgatory vibe from Lewton's aforementioned ZOMBIE but in an urban setting...

Jean Brooks in THE SEVENTH VICTIM

Replete with familiar faces, like Hugh Beaumont as the too-perfect fiance of Hunter's plot-important sibling, played against type by LEOPARD MAN nice girl Jean Brooks, broodingly bathed in a Gothic mystique with long, straight, raven-black hair... and her cornball expository romance with Beaumont gets predictably handed off to Hunter, who looks too young and is far better suited to offbeat yet helpful poet Erford Gage...

Summing up the biggest problem with THE SEVENTH VICTIM, a bleak thriller that, while ahead of its time and paving the way for Gothic underground cinema, can't completely shake the B&W-era melodramatic style — and yet, thankfully, with the help of CAT PEOPLE psychologist Tom Conway and the best sequence involving mousy Lou Lubin as a spooked gumshoe — the darkness ultimately triumphs.