FAQ

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When Mary Gibson's (Kim Hunter) older sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) goes missing, Mary leaves her private school and travels to New York in order to find her. Her investigation leads her to Jacqueline's secret husband Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont) and to a secret cult of devil-worshippers who are also hunting Jacqueline...to kill her.

The Seventh Victim is based on a screenplay co-written by American screenwriters Charles O'Neal and DeWitt Bodeen (who also wrote the screenplay for Cat People (1942) (1942), another film by producer Val Lewton). In fact, some critics suggest that The Seventh Victim is a prequel to Cat People. Others see it as a sequel.

Dr Judd (Tom Conway) appears in both films, and Elizabeth Russell, who plays the dying woman Mimi, also reappears as a cat woman in Cat People. Those who see The Seventh Victim as a sequel suggest that Judd was only injured when he was attacked by Irena (Simone Simon). They also point to a scene in which Judd says that he once knew a beautiful and mysterious woman who became a raving lunatic and contend that he is referring to Irena.

She was conjugating the French verb "chercher", meaning "to look for." Je cherche...tu cherches...il cherche...nous cherchons...vous cherchez...ils cherchent.

That was Irving August (Lou Lubin), the PI that Mary hired to find Jacqueline. Mary saw him stabbed while they were investigating Jacqueline's cosmetic plant. Later that night, Mary saw him on the subway car in which she was riding. He was dead and being carried by two men wearing tophats. Why he was killed is unknown at this point in the movie. Viewers are meant to assume that he was murdered because he was snooping, and he'd already been warned to stop. Just before he was killed, he revealed to Mary that, contrary to what Esther Redi (Mary Newton), Jacqueline's business partner, had told her about Jacqueline selling her La Sagesse Cosmetics, Jacqueline had actually deeded the whole thing over to her as a gift. Later in the movie, we find out that August was stabbed with a scissors by Jacqueline because she was frightened when he came snooping around her hiding place.

It's been suggested by a few viewers that they might have known Mary would be on that subway car and so placed August's body there for Mary to see, possibly to scare her into returning to school and giving up the search for Jacqueline. However, most viewers feel that it was pure coincidence. Later in the movie, we found out that it was, in fact, coincidental. The two men were simply trying to ditch August's body.

No. Gregory knows only that she's hiding somewhere. The only one who knows where Jacqueline is hiding is the mysterious psychiatrist, Dr Louis Judd, and he's not talking. He only comes around occasionally to collect money from Gregory, supposedly to give to Jacqueline.

Because Jacqueline told Dr Judd about the Palladists, and she thinks they want to kill her.

The Palladists are an organization of devil worshippers. Oddly enough, their primary concern is nonviolence, with one exception. As it is written by their founder: "Those who who go out into the marketplace and let their tongues speak of us, and give knowledge of our being and our deeds, whomsoever shall do this shall die." Because of Jacqueline's loose tongue, she has been marked as the seventh victim, there having been six others who were also eliminated because of their loose tongues. Hence, the title of the movie, The Seventh Victim.

Yes, about 30 minutes into a movie, Dr Judd takes Mary to her see her Jacqueline appears for about three seconds, then she disappears. She doesn't show up again for another 25 minutes when Judd takes Mary, Gregory, and Mary's friend Jason (Erford Gage) to Jacqueline's new hiding place.

When the Palladists are unable to make Jacqueline drink poison and their hit man fails to kill her in the street, Jacqueline returns to her own apartment where, in her depression and sense of the spectacular and macabre, she keeps a noose hanging from the ceiling in case she should ever want to kill herself. We hear a chair topple over and the sound of a board creaking. At that moment, Jacqueline's neighbor Mimi, who is preoccupied with dying, leaves her apartment all decked out in her finest, telling herself that she wants to live.