GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Alex da Silva Schoolgirl Kim Hunter (Mary) is called to the office of the Headmistress Ottola Nesmith and told that she can no longer stay on as a pupil as her sister Jean Brooks (Jacqueline) has stopped paying her fees. More than that, Brooks seems to have gone missing. So, Hunter goes off to find her. But Brooks isn't so easy to locate.This film leaves you with scenes stuck in your mind, so it's good from that perspective. It is also well shot with an eerie atmosphere. Scenes that stand out include the sequence with Hunter and a detective exploring an office at night and the subsequent spooky train ride, a shower scene that will make you think of "Psycho" (1960) and pretty much every scene with Brooks. Fancy a drink? – no thanks but the pressure is on. And how about that ending? Wow, pretty bleak stuff. Especially coming after what had me cringing as we watched God and the Bible being used as a tool to counter Satan and his ways in an extremely simplistic way.Amo, Amas, Amat, Amamus, Amatis, Amant – remember your Latin from school? The 'ablative absolute' and the 'ut' clause (use the subjunctive). Quamquam. This film also throws in some Latin and I'm glad to hear it. It takes the viewer back to a time sadly long gone as we hear schoolgirls reciting the verb 'Amo' – to love. The day will come when a generation will watch this film and not understand what language it is.The cast are OK with Jean Brooks standing out. Her look suggests she is leader of the occult movement rather than a victim of it. And all of her scenes are quality – some genuinely scary, and all unworldly because of her appearance. That ending with the neighbour comes as a shock and leaves an eerie memory that will have you thinking about how we view life. It's an interesting film…and sad.

atlasmb "The Seventh Victim" includes some interesting literary allusions and references, and it provides a parade of actors who are fun to identify for modern viewers, but otherwise it is not worth viewing.The story is about a young woman, Mary (Kim Hunter), who goes to New York City to find her sister, Jacqueline (Jean Brooks). It seems Jacqueline has fallen in with a satanic cult that does little more than try to keep its members from resigning. The story is mostly filmed at night, of course, which allows for plenty of scenes with abundant shadows--so the viewer can be frightened (?) by animals running into trash cans and irrelevant characters standing under street lights.Evidently other viewers disagree, but I found many reasons to find this film superficial and ineffective. Some call it a suspense drama, but I felt no suspense. There is a minimal amount of mystery involving Jacqueline's whereabouts, but the resolution of that mystery is a tremendous letdown, as is the film's ending.I blame the director and the screenwriter for most of the film's failures. It feels like each actor was given directions unrelated to other characters, like "You behave as if you are always close to going over the edge. You act like nothing much matters. You ignore the concerns of the others and make offhand remarks about your apartment. You sit in the half shadows and every once in a while you can shift your eyes from side to side." Of course the script is primarily responsible for the disjointed nature of the film.A much more effective and unified film, for example, is "Rosemary's Baby".I would much rather read about this film than watch it. For its time, I think it tried to be modern. Symbolism is used throughout in an attempt to directly access the emotions of viewers, but the film in its entirety is too silly to support that attempt. Furthermore, the childish use of religion undercuts that effort. Does anyone really seriously fear or find heinous a group of cultists who are intimidated and cowed by the reading of a Bible passage?

helenandgraham For a few years in the early 1940s a small, B-feature producer achieved something very unusual within the Hollywood industrial system: a series of personalised films featuring a repertory company of performers, directors, writers and technicians. The producer, a Russian émigré who anglicised his name to Val Lewton, had been kicking around Hollywood for years, initially as a writer and then as a gofer for David Selznick, before RKO gave him an opportunity to produce B movies. These had to be completed in six weeks, produced in the studio lot using existing sets and on a shoestring budget. The first, Cat People, was an enormous success. Thereafter, he was saddled with increasingly crass titles (I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, Curse of the Cat People) which belied the haunting and melancholic quality of the films themselves. Despite the restrictions, Lewton proved a shrewd operator. Using inexperienced directors with ambition (Mark Robson directed The Seventh Victim and others who owed long future careers to Lewton included Robert Wise and Jacques Tourneur), Lewton was able to create an ensemble of considerable talent, over which he presided with a unifying sensibility unlike that of any other producer, with the possible exception of his former boss, David Selznick. The Seventh Victim was the first of the series not to attract a lurid title and, possibly in consequence, did less well than others. The film defies genre: neither thriller nor horror film but with elements of both, the plot is a quest. Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter) is told by the head teacher of her boarding school that she will have to leave because her sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) has stopped paying the fees and disappeared. Mary travels to New York where she makes chilling discoveries about her sister's life. Along the way, Lewton's script provides his trademark moments of shock and black humour (an elegant one-armed woman is asked to play the piano and deal cards) and provides ample evidence of the influence Lewton's work had on his friend, Alfred Hitchcock, and Roman Polanski. At 78 minutes the film is a model of spare story-telling though, inevitably, the strictures of budget, time (filming took only 24 days) and studio control had some impact on performances. These are mitigated by the availability of RKO's house team of designers, director of photography, Nicholas Musuraca and composer, Roy Webb, which lends it a visual and aural richness well beyond its means. The Seventh Victim's uniqueness, however, is that, like the John Donne sonnet with which it opens and closes, it is a meditation on death, quite unlike anything else of its time and place, personified by the beautiful and haunted face of Jean Brooks as she walks the rainy streets of a studio-bound Manhattan. Lewton went on to produce seven more films at RKO in the next three years before a making a series of disastrous career choices that limited his output to only two further films before his death of a heart attack at the age of 46 in 1951. Footnote: Intrigued by his lack of further credits, I recently looked up the career details of one of the actors in The Seventh Victim, Erford Gage, only to discover that he was killed in action on Iwo Jima in 1945, some 18 months after The Seventh Victim was released.

Jackson Booth-Millard The debut film from director Mark Robson (Earthquake), I found this in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, so I was curious to see it only rated two out of five stars by critics, but I soldiered on anyway. Basically at Miss Highcliff's boarding school in upstate New York, young Mary Gibson (introducing Kim Hunter) is informed that her sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks), her only relative, is missing and has not paid her tuition for six months, Mary can only stay on if she pays the tuition by working for them. Instead Mary leaves the school and returns to New York City to find her sister, she finds out Jacqueline sold her cosmetics business eight months ago, her sister's rented apartment is empty, with only a chair and a noose hanging from the ceiling, this makes Mary much more anxious and determined to find Jacqueline. In her investigation Mary is lead to Jacqueline's secret husband Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont), failed poet Jason Hoag (Erford Gage), and mysterious psychiatrist Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway) who was treating Jacqueline as her patient for depression, routed from her membership in the Palladists, a Satanic cult who she was seduced into joining by her former co-workers. Private eye detective Irving August (Lou Lubin) is enlisted to help the investigation, but he murdered by stabbing under mysterious circumstances, but Dr. Judd helps Mary find her sister, but Ward has found himself falling in love with Mary, Jacqueline was hiding from the cult. But members of the cult find and kidnap Jacqueline, and she is condemned to death, a rule of the cult is that anyone who reveals the cult exists must die, she would be the seventh person to die under this rule, hence the film title, but they have rules against violence, and she is already suicidal, so they tell her she should kill herself. Jacqueline refuses to kill herself, so the Palladists allow her to leave, but she is followed by an assassin, she manages to avoid him and returns to Mary's apartment, next to her own, she briefly encounters her young terminally ill neighbour Mimi (Elizabeth Russell), she is afraid to die but plans a last night out on the town. While Mary and Ward find affection for each other during their time together, in the end Jacqueline goes back to her own apartment and hangs herself, the chair thudding after falling is heard, but the sick woman does not recognise the sound as she leaves. Also starring Isabel Jewell as Frances Fallon, Evelyn Brent as Natalie Cortez and Ben Bard as Mr. Brun. In her first leading role Hunter proves an upcoming talent, she indeed out performs co-stars Conway and Beaumont screaming on cue and looking constantly nervous, three years later she was cast in A Matter of Life and Death, then she won an Oscar for A Streetcar Named Desire, and then came three Planet of the Apes films, pretty good considering. As for the film itself, this does feel creepy and atmospheric, the best sequences being with the cult members being forceful and sadistic towards their victims, but the script is rather underwritten, full of some clichés, and there are just better horror films. Okay!