Trailer
Plot summary
The head of Highcliffe Academy tells Mary Gibson that her sister Jacqueline has vanished and that her tuition has gone unpaid for months. Mary leaves school for New York City, where Jacqueline owns a cosmetics company, La Sagesse, and where Esther Redi, once Jacqueline's assistant, says she bought the business from her eight months earlier. Frances Fallon, who works there, says she saw Jacqueline a week before at Dante, a restaurant in Greenwich Village. Above Dante, Mary finds the room Jacqueline rented but never moved into, empty apart from one wooden chair and a noose fixed to the ceiling. A poet, Jason Hoag, offers to help in the search.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Seventh Victim (1943)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- DeWitt Bodeen purportedly based the film's Satanic cult on a real society he had encountered in New York; Jacqueline's cosmetics company, La Sagesse, drew on his work as a journalist covering cosmetic companies, and the restaurant Dante was based on Barbetta in Manhattan.
SPOILER
The Seventh Victim ends with the suicide of one of its main characters, a resolution that went against the spirit, if not the letter, of Hollywood's Production Code.- A cut scene had Judd visit Natalie, indicating he wished to join the Palladists, and unintentionally reveal that Jacqueline was staying with Mary, which showed how the cult traced her; in the released print that is left unclear.
- Charles O'Neal wrote the script as a California-set murder mystery about a woman hunted by a serial killer; DeWitt Bodeen revised it into a Satanic-cult story set as a prequel to Cat People, with Conway reprising his role as Dr. Louis Judd.
- The failure of The Seventh Victim at the box office, on top of that of Lewton and Robson's next film The Ghost Ship, led Lewton to scrap two planned projects, The Screaming Skull and The Amorous Ghost.
- Roy Webb's score for The Seventh Victim is possibly the only Hollywood film score of the period to end in a minor key.
