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Reviews
The Seventh Victim (1943)
The Seventh Victim: a rarely-seen gem
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.
Expresso Bongo (1959)
Cliff Richard's best film
Watching any film 50 years after you last saw it is, at any time, a mildly unnerving experience. A film that boasts the dubious title 'Expresso Bongo' and features a not-greatly post-pubescent Cliff Richard should have provided a strong warning that turning back the clock is not always a good idea but, actually, this was a great pleasure. Based on a successful stage musical and set in the heart of the Soho music industry of the late 1950s as it comes to terms with rock and roll , 'Expresso Bongo' retains a salty edge even now. Laurence Harvey plays a chancer who happens to come across a young rocker (Cliff Richard) who he seeks to exploit shamelessly but who then proves more than a match for him. With a sharp, pungent and funny script (by 50s star writer Wolf Mankowitz) and plenty of night location shooting in Soho, the film fizzes along for the most part, resembling 'Sweet Smell of Success', but with songs and a slightly softer edge. The version on this DVD has been shorn of its extrinsic musical numbers (including one sung by old-style musical promoter Maier Tzelniker that I remember well, starting 'When I compare these little bleeders to the chorus from Aida
.nausea!') but still has time for the wonderfully cynical 'Shrine on the Second Floor', as Cliff is propelled into religiosity to further his career. Harvey's weaselly good looks are just right and Sylvia Sims is very sexy as his long-suffering stripper girlfriend. Even Cliff acquits himself well, with just the right amount of ambivalence as to his complicity (including being asked, not for the last time, why he has no girlfriend). In a film where everyone is either on the make or being exploited, sometimes at the same time, there is at least one poignant real-life parallel. The distinguished stage actress Hermione Baddelley here plays a veteran street tart. She has a couple of affectionate scenes with Harvey, with whom, despite their age difference, she had a relationship in the early 1950s just as his career was getting under way. Now, Harvey was on a roll and would shortly go to Hollywood on the strength of his next film, 'Man at the Top'.