4 - Searching for Meaning in the Seventh Victim

Summary

Production History from A to B

After producing two box office hits in Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, RKO granted Val Lewton his fondest wish, an “A” budget for his next picture. He finally found surcease to his penitential production of “B” horror films. Lewton and writers Charles O’Neal and DeWitt Bodeen set to work on a script to Koerner's latest title, The Seventh Victim. Lewton liked this title as it differed from the previous three for containing no reference to a monster.

With a completed script of ninety-pages’ length appropriate for an “A” budget film, Charles Koerner delivered Lewton a setback by assigning director Edward Dmytryk to the project. Lewton wanted to promote his editor, Mark Robson, to the director's chair out of both loyalty and friendship. Dmytryk was another veteran of Universal Picture's horror cycle, having just completed Captive Wild Woman (1943). He was also enjoying “savior of the studio” status at RKO for his Hitler's Children (1943) having matched Cat People at the box office. Had Lewton given him a chance, they may have worked well together given their similar leftist politics. Dmytryk became one of the Hollywood Ten accused by Senator Joseph McCarthy of communist affiliations. Lewton helped form The Committee for the First Amendment, a support group for the Hollywood Ten. By 1945, the FBI concluded that Lewton was “a known communist” and began recording the license plates of cars owned by people with whom Lewton associated.

Despite their shared political sensibilities, Lewton protested RKO's choice of Dmytryk long and loud (likely while wearing his “dog puke tie”), but to no avail. RKO held firm and would not assign a first-time director to an “A” budget project. Lewton had to choose between loyalty to Robson or his longhoped- for “A” budget. Lewton chose Robson, and the film's budget shrank to a punitive US$114,000. An obstinate Lewton had Robson shoot the entire script. A ninety-one-minute version of the film was screened only to have RKO executives insist on cutting it to seventy-one minutes, a more orthodox running time for a “B” picture.

Editor John Lockert performed a magical job cutting the film down to a “B” running time. The ellipses that stem from his cuts provide a narrative rich with dead ends and lost threads.