It's obvious Hollywood saw women as little more than objects of desire in 1943. In one of the year's most iconic films, Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, a young woman pines weirdly for her visiting uncle, her primary purpose to please the men of her household. Yet little-known horror noir The Seventh Victim (directed by Mark Robson but helmed by producer Val Lewton), a film released the same year as the Hitchcock classic, has a radically different portrayal of women. Its female characters control their own destinies, share intimate sexual relationships with one another, and aren't afraid to answer back to men.
The film focuses on Mary (played by the striking Kim Hunter), a young woman who learns that her older sister and only guardian Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) has gone missing in New York. When told by her boarding school that her sister has stopped paying for her tuition, Mary is forced to go to the city to search for answers. As she departs, one of her female teachers advises, "Don't come back here, no matter what. A woman must have courage to really live in this world." It's the first of several overtly feminist statements in the film that serve to amplify the strength of femininity.
When Mary is ordered to drink her milk in a café by a man who claims to know of Jacqueline's whereabouts, she shouts back, "I don't like to be ordered to do anything. Don't you dare treat me like a child!" He politely replies, "I promise I'll never order you around again." While this exchange might not seem too radical in 2017, it is uncharacteristically bold for the sexist 1940s.
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