Official synopsis as stated by HBO and TCM: A girl’s search for her missing sister puts her in conflict with a band of Satanists.

Disclaimer: The 7th Victim is listed under horror, and also is newly uploaded to the TCM hub of HBO, so I was drawn to it. Having now been compelled to watch it twice in search of clarity I find myself even more drawn to it, although it leaves me with some feelings of frustration. I got the sense very early in the film that this was one of those movies that was written in a sort of code to get around the censors, even though I didn’t know exactly what was being encoded. I think a movie can in fact have a sell-by date, an idea I’ve never really endorsed before, but it all depends on how clearly the point of the movie was made to begin with. Simply put, I’m at a disadvantage here 80 plus years in the future because I don’t know how things would have been implied to a 1943 audience, and I have not been raised with the same taboos that would even make implication/versus/explication necessary in the first place. But I do want to state that I am not one of those people who throws all black and white movies out the window on principle, and I’m willing to put in the work to understand something that is encoded, especially a work of fiction that affects me emotionally. However, with The 7th Victim I’m impeded by the triple whammy of outdatedness, deliberate obscuration of themes, and plain old bad editing.

Unofficial synopsis: Mary is a young orphaned woman, age not stated, attending a boarding school her sister Jacqueline pays for. I get the sense Mary is a minor child, though. Her headmistress calls her into the office to tell her that her sister has long since stopped paying and also has disappeared, and the only other contact, Jacqueline’s co-worker, is being unhelpful. Mary is given two choices: stay and attend on a work/study scheme, or be advanced the money to go to the city and look for her sister. (I have a bad habit of referring to people by their relationship and not their name, even when I’m talking in real life. I have read that this is an unconscious distancing technique).

Mary does go to the city and said co-worker, Mrs. Redi, is indeed unhelpful. But she’s not a co-worker, she has bought Jacqueline’s business, which might be a perfume factory and might be a salon. It’s better if I don’t point out these inconsistencies because we’ll be here all day. Another employee, Frances, who is previously known to Mary, says she’s seen Jacqueline at an Italian restaurant. The restaurant owners after some back and forth show Mary to a room Jacqueline has rented from them upstairs, but there’s nothing in it but a noose and a chair.

The police aren’t much help, but there’s a private detective at the missing persons’ bureau who wants to help in exchange for 50 of Mary’s American dollars. (That’s another thing I do to distance myself, put movie references where they don’t go, in this case Olga from Suspiria’s 50 dollars dialogue.) That’s almost $1000 in today’s money, so she doesn’t have it, but she says she’s going to get a job. He mentions looking in the hospitals and morgues, so Mary goes to the morgue without hiring him and finds out that a man named Mr. Ward is also looking for her sister. Would you believe he is played by Hugh Beaumont who is best known to me as TV dad Ward Cleaver, but both characters having Ward in their name is only a coincidence? Ward is an attorney, and secretly Jacqueline’s husband, but there seems to be no love between them when we eventually find her, and we do. After we find her, three times in fact because she keeps disappearing again, the movie spirals even more into less of a story and more of a feeling. Two feelings: the frustration which plagues me in daily life (low frustration point) and a ghoulish desire to see what will happen next, and then see it again. How many horror fans also experience a low frustration point? Is this endemic to our breed?

I love spoilers because they reduce my feelings of stress, but if you don’t then read no further.

Going back to my certainty from the beginning that this story is not what it appears to be at all, I have found that critics agree that this is a film about homosexuality, specifically between Jacqueline and Frances. This leads me to wonder if the marriage between Ward and Jacqueline was a lavender marriage, or what we now call a mixed-orientation marriage, in order for both to appear straight. But then why would Ward not tell Mary he was her brother-in-law? I also realized once learning about the film being gay-coded that there is a scene right at the beginning in which the assistant to the headmistress tells Mary to leave the school and never come back, because Mary has been told that she can always return. The assistant (Ms. Gilchrist) explains that she herself was an orphan who tried to make her way in the world after leaving that same school, but was not brave enough and came back, and now she can’t leave. Is Ms. Gilchrist stuck at the school because she’s institutionalized, in other words, not psychologically strong enough to exist outside the structure of the school that raised her, OR, is she in a power-imbalanced sexual relationship with the headmistress, Ms. Lowood.

It is important to point out that later in the film Mrs. Redi breaks into Mary’s apartment while Mary is in the shower and tells Mary to leave, stop looking for Jacqueline, and go back to the school, which I believe is a deliberate callback to Ms Gilchrist’s warning. This was a scandalous thing to do in 1943, going into someone’s apartment and verbally abusing them while they are in the shower, naked and vulnerable, and not a stellar thing to do in the present day either, but was it gay-coded for the time? I don’t like the fictional idea of predatory lesbians but they seem to thrive in the fiction of the 40s and 50s enough for these scenes to possibly be coded (see also The Uninvited 1944.) Another theme that comes up when depicting lesbians in older media is suicide, (see also The Children’s Hour, The Fox). Jacqueline eventually makes use of the noose and chair in her rented room, but it’s not explicitly due to her relationship with Frances; instead, it’s because she’s in a cabal of satanists which includes Frances and Mrs. Redi, and the cult tells her she has to kill herself because it’s in the rules of the cult for anyone who betrays them. People just do what Mrs. Redi says in the universe of The 7th Victim, which is one of the sources of my frustration. Jacqueline is the 7th victim of the title. Six other people have betrayed the cult. They are a non-violent cult by rule, unless someone betrays them, which Jacqueline has by seeing a psychiatrist. See also, The Sopranos.

The other source is Jacqueline herself. First of all, she has stupid tiny short bangs with dyed black hair, and tiny bangs make me irrationally angry. They really do. Jacqueline allows a shadowy cabal of religious fanatics to dictate she should abandon the child she’s responsible for. She displays no more concern for Mary than the clippings swept up from the floor of the hair salon/perfume factory she owned. I know it’s supposed to be because she’s depressed, and her fate is telegraphed right from the opening of the film: before we even see any characters we see a card with part of a John Donne sonnet “I run to death and death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterday.” We hear this line spoken by a woman’s voice as the last bit of dialogue too. So are the satanists symbolic of depression, or the fear of one’s homosexuality? I really don’t know.

What I do know is that I liked Mary as protagonist when she was off and out into the world to solve a mystery, though I guess this got subverted. At the very beginning she’s going up the stairs at the office while all her classmates are going down the stairs. We hear a girl’s voice conjugating the Latin verb To Love, and we hear another voice conjugate the French verb To Search after Mary leaves the office determined to find Jacqueline. The we hear a voice recite part of the poem The Chambered Nautlius by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.: “Build thee more stately mansions in my soul as the swift seasons roll.” This poem evidently compares the spiral of a nautilus to personal growth, which Mary is approaching. But the story soon becomes less about Mary and more about Jacqueline, who is not written or acted in such a way as to inspire, and Mary’s story becomes more about whether she will choose an ill-advised relationship with her brother-in-law, or with a poet I forgot to mention who also takes on the role of a private detective. Is Jacqueline also a symbol of something Mary hopes to attain, with a girlish and naive view of what life is like? We know that Mary admired her sister but also found her careless. Careless doesn’t even begin to describe giving away a successful hair factory, cutting your hair in tiny bangs, abandoning your family, and joining a satanic cult.

No, this movie can’t be about anything but the seemingly irrational way a person behaves while in the depths of a major depression, behavior which seems so frustrating to the ones who love them, and yet is perfectly reasonable to the sufferer themselves. And I need to learn to have more empathy for depressed characters in film.

Mary does find work as a kindergarten teacher (confusion, isn’t she a child herself??) and is at one point seen teaching her students the English nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons which includes the line, “here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head,” but I’m not going to attempt to unpack something that probably deals with English politics of the 18th century. It just seems to go well with the dank nature of the film.

Two more things I observed: it’s very convenient to completely obscure yourself in shadows in a black and white movie. It must have been really hard to play hide-and-seek before the world was in color. Also, there is a moment when the psychiatrist says to the poet after Jacqueline is found for the third time in the film (as the two have been working together to sort of help Mary), in regards to their own association, “to me this seems to be the end of a delightful relationship.” Is this a deliberate play on the “beginning of a beautiful friendship” line at the end of Casablanca, which came out the year before? If so it might be the only humor in the film, aside from the Italian restaurant owner’s repeated assertion that the dour poet is in fact a very funny man. The 7th Victim might suffer from what Mike and the bots pointed out in their riff of Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (which does heavily borrow from Casablanca) that you should never mention a good movie in your bad movie. Or good poetry, or bad nursery rhymes. This is not a bad movie, but a deliberately and accidentally confusing one, and yet somehow one that I won’t be able to forget.