Vic­tim (1961)

You want to be able to watch a movie like 1961’s Vic­tim and breathe a sigh of relief that the world and social atti­tudes have moved on. You want to believe that such absurd and illog­i­cal lev­els of per­se­cu­tion would be a thing of the past, that peo­ple would embrace enlight­en­ment and be hap­py to live and let live. And yet, it’s a film whose sub­ject still rings alarm bells today, being about the lives of gay men in Lon­don when the dra­con­ian Sex­u­al Offences Act (aka The Blackmailer’s Char­ter) was still being enforced and they were nudged deep into the shadows.

There are some in the film who see homo­sex­u­al­i­ty as a sick per­ver­sion, but its focus remains trained on the ever-widen­ing ring of black­mail­ing fan­cy boys who extort mon­ey by pho­tograph­ing men in com­pro­mis­ing posi­tions and then threat­en to shop them to the cops. Dirk Bog­a­rde is superb as Melville Farr, the styl­ish upstart bar­ris­ter who has it all: the plush house, the dot­ing wife (Sylvia Sims) and the prospect of soon being appoint­ed a judge. But a stolen moment with a young man in a car by a park is cap­tured with a pry­ing tele­pho­to lens, and sud­den­ly Farr’s prospects are look­ing dim.

Basil Dearden’s method­i­cal film shies away from hys­te­ria and base shock tac­tics to focus on the per­son­al, far-reach­ing trau­ma caused by this law. The ice-cool Farr thinks that, with his broad legal skill set, he can untan­gle this mess with com­pro­mise, back­room talks and sen­si­ble deal­ing, but he is quick­ly made to com­pre­hend just how high the chips are stacked against him. Per­haps the most trag­ic ele­ment of the film is how ashamed he’s made to feel about his sex­u­al­i­ty, but that he’s also gen­uine­ly in love with his wife.

This is a film of men engag­ing in awk­ward con­ver­sa­tions and talk­ing in a kind of semi code. For the first ten min­utes, where the exis­tence of the pho­to­graph comes to light, Dear­den makes it look like some kind of gen­tle­man spy ring has been com­pro­mised. What’s great about the film is that it nev­er resorts to the type of crude gay stereo­types that like­ly fuelled the rabid ire of homo­phobes at the time. The men try­ing to keep their sex lives hid­den are entire­ly nor­mal and, in fact, rather dull. There are some more flam­boy­ant char­ac­ters, but they are root­ed in real­i­ty rather than a sim­plis­tic cul­tur­al perception.

In acknowl­edge­ment of the 50^th anniver­sary of the repeal of the Sex­u­al Offences Act, Vic­tim gets anoth­er wel­come run-out in UK cin­e­mas. But it’s worth see­ing for what it has to say about the engrained big­otry of today rather than just its depic­tion of cru­eller times past.