13 CHILLS 2011

By JASON COMERFORD

Val Lewton may have been the only poet to ever become a successful film producer. Born Vladimir Ivan Leventon, his family emigrated from Russia to Port Chester, New York in 1909. He studied journalism at Columbia, and honed his craft writing pulp fiction, poetry, and nonfiction before landing a job as a writer for MGM’s New York publicity office. This lead to a juicy position as a publicist and assistant to David O. Selznick, arguably the biggest megaproducer of his time.

In 1942, Lewton landed what, on the surface, seemed a cursory assignment: control over the RKO “horror unit,” with stipulations that his productions come in under a certain budget and running time, using lurid titles not of his choosing. Lewton, however, took his opportunity and ran with it at full speed. Over a stretch of just four years, from 1942-1946, Lewton produced a string of genre favorites, an incredible and rarely-rivaled string of films all united by their intelligence, sophistication and teasing suggestiveness. And like so many bright flames, Lewton’s burned out early: a pair of heart attacks contributed to his death in 1951, at just 46 years of age.

Lewton is perhaps best remembered for Cat People and its immediate sequel The Curse of the Cat People, but his 1943 production The Seventh Victim truly represents his finest hour. An elliptical tale of a young woman’s investigation into the disappearance of her sister at the hands of a cult of devil worshippers, The Seventh Victim’s bleak, despairing vision of alienation and urban paranoia seems brave by 2011 standards; by the standards of its time, it’s positively transgressive. The Seventh Victim’s knotty, shifting plot and startlingly downbeat finale linger in the mind long after the credits roll, and its haunting power is quietly devastating.

Composer Roy Webb was Lewton’s frequent choice for underscore, but Webb was not often called upon to make the supernatural elements of Lewton’s productions explicit; indeed, one of the defining characteristics of a Val Lewton production is its canny use of silence and diegetic sound, as opposed to musical editorializing. The Seventh Victim, however, does boast a particularly shivery musical moment in its latter half, and Webb rises to the task with aplomb. Having finally been successfully located, Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) confesses to a life of hedonism and murder, with director Mark Robson capturing the moment in a hypnotic slow push-in on her chillingly blank face. As Scott MacQueen noted for Marco Polo’s 1999 reconstruction of the score:

Her mystique built-up over several reels, Jacqueline is introduced late in the story with a continued air of mystery. Webb provides a motif played by celeste and harp comprised of a two-note, fourth-interval figure. It repeats three times, moves chromatically up a half-step, then repeats the basic pattern. It is harmonized four intervals higher by violins. Having established an almost vertiginous sense of unbalanced perpetual motion, Webb then raises the entire motif, again chromatically by a half-step, adding a running chromatic counter-melody in the bass strings… In its chromatic wanderings, Webb’s motif perfectly fits this aimless, lost woman.

Like so many RKO productions of import large and small, The Seventh Victim’s original film recordings are long lost. But the exacting reconstruction work of John Morgan rescued the score from obscurity; Marco Polo’s 1999 album Cat People: Music from the Films of Val Lewton, performed by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra under the eminently able baton of William Stromberg, included newly-recorded highlights from Cat People, Bedlam, The Seventh Victim, The Body Snatcher, and I Walked With A Zombie, and is an essential listen for any fan of Golden Age terror.


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