Cast:
Tom Conway (Doctor Louis Judd), Jean Brooks (Jacqueline Gibson), Isabel Jewell (Frances Fallon), Kim Hunter (Mary Gibson), Evelyn Brent (Natalie Cortez), Erford Gage (Jason Hoag), Ben Bard (Mr. Brun), Hugh Beaumont (Gregory Ward), Chef Milani (Mr. Jacob), and Marguerita Sylva (Mrs. Bella Romari) Directed by Mark Robson (#1797 - Home of the Brave and #1931 - Valley of the Dolls)
Review:
"It had a rather sinister quality, of something intangible but horribly real; it had an atmosphere. I think the actors and the director had to believe very strongly in the possibilities of disaster: that something was there. We believed it ourselves. We talked ourselves into believing it. We had a kind of fidelity to that feeling. We had the characters speak throughout in a deliberately quiet, polite and subdued manner, engendering a very calculated undercurrent of possible disaster."
This was the fourth of nine movies produced by Val Lewton in what you might call his horror cycle, all for RKO. The movie was written by Charles O'Neal and DeWitt Bodeen. The movie was to be directed by Jacques Tourneur, but he had other plans that saw the promotion of Mark Robson to direct. The Montreal native had actually studied at UCLA and Pacific Coast University School of Law but found his first work in film with the prop department at 20th Century Fox. But he did not settle there, later going to RKO Pictures that saw him start training in film editing. It was here that Robson served as an assistant to Robert Wise on the editing of Citizen Kane (1941), among other things. He then became a main editor for RKO that saw him work on, well, the Lewton features you probably would guess with Cat People (it was Robson who accidentally came up with that one particular sequence involving a bus) and so on. Robson would direct a handful of movies for RKO (which included four for Lewton) before going to various studios for a career that ultimately spanned over three decades. You can probably guess that this movie had a few phases before becoming what you see today: for one, there was initially a pitch involving a murder plot in oil wells before Lewton's supervision saw it go to, well, a cult in the Village, with Bodeen claiming to have based it on a real thing he saw in New York (the movie title refers to Jacqueline, as she is the seventh person condemned for betrayal in the history of the cult-although the cult does not go around killing people, they goad them instead). This was the third of four Lewton-connected movies released in 1943 (with this being released in August), with the others being I Walked with a Zombie (April), The Leopard Man (May), and The Ghost Ship (December). The movie was a flop with audiences at the time, with one cinema worker joking that they must've been the eighth victim. Of course, time has treated it differently (according to Robson, he was asked about the movie by the Boulting brothers who used to bicycle around London a print of the film, which was thought to be "an advanced, weird form of film-making").
I really wished I liked the movie more. But if you are into movies that might tangentially remind you of the dread found in later movies involving cults in one's wake such as, well, Rosemary's Baby (1968), this may be up your alley. The movie was shot in the course of 24 days, but the editing process (as overseen by Robson and John Lockert) was probably more crucial to, well, how things play out. A handful of scenes were cut from the film that relate to certain events in the film and the ending itself was trimmed to basically just end right after one certain sound is heard. It is a slow web to untangle for 71 minutes that probably is akin to actual life in not exactly going the way you think it will unfold for some sort of eerie feeling. That or basically one is watching a noir more than a straight horror film, but I suppose your taste (or patience) may vary. People come and go in the movie, since Hunter (in her film debut) probably is in the movie more than Brooks, although each do pretty well with what the movie shades out in wayward people looking for the way back (okay one is looking to die, but at least she knows where everybody goes anyway). The movie only really seems to gel into fascination in its latter half for me, mostly because it actually stops introducing people and shows what I guess is something about cults that claim to be big on the Devil (notice how they aren't actually stopped at the end, you just see some folks recite the Lord's Prayer at them - good thing they weren't doing anything like killing goats or evading their taxes, oooh!). I guess what I want to say is that it only vaguely holds my fascination because it has that same problem that I ended up having with Rosemary's Baby: get to the damn point, although at least you could almost watch this movie (71 minutes) twice in the time it takes to finish Rosemary. I want to feel like there is more of a looming threat than just a bunch of folks playing house because heaven forbid they go to a church or a bar to find "worship". At least the ending does do one thing right: it simply just ends, because even a thud works for effect. As a whole, it follows along the line of the prior Lewton-connected movies in fine quality with eye-catching titles and interesting imagination with the eerie things that come to lurk in everyday life, whether that involves loneliness or cults or the unknown.
Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.
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