The Seventh Victim **** (1943, Kim Hunter, Tom Conway, Isabel Jewell, Hugh Beaumont, Jean Brooks) – Classic Movie Review 3779

The legendary chiller king Val Lewton produces director Mark Robson’s deliciously brooding and sinister 1943 film noir-style melodrama about a group of Satanists in Greenwich Village uncovered by the heroine Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter), after she arrives in New York City to seek her vanished older sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks).

She meets her sister’s husband Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont) and mysterious psychiatrist Dr Louis Judd (Tom Conway), who claims to know of Jacqueline’s whereabouts. And she finds that her sister is involved with the murderous devil worshippers.

Expect suicides, fits of paranoia and menacing metaphysics in Robson’s creepy, compelling mixture of Gothic chiller and film noir, with a neat line in weird, mysterious atmosphere that was such a hallmark of Val Lewton’s movies, with the help of Nicholas Musuraca’s gleaming black and white photography.

It also stars Isabel Jewell, Erford Gage, Evelyn Brent, Elizabeth Russell, and Barbara Hale.

Also in the cast are Ben Bard, Chef Milani, Marguerita Sylva, Joan Barclay, Wally Brown, Feodor Chaliapin Jr, Kernan Cripps, Lorna Dunn, Edythe Elliott, Bud Geary, William Halligan, Lloyd Ingraham, Tiny Jones, Milton Kibbee, Adua Kuznetrzoff, Lou Lubin, Eve March, Marianne Mosner, Ottola Nesmith, Mary Newton, Eileen O’Malley, Cyril Ring, Betty Roadman, Dewey Robinson, Sarah Selby and Ann Summers.

It is written by Charles O’Neal and DeWitt Bodeen.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3779

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