Victim (1961) | Little White Lies

Vic­tim (1961)

21 Jul 2017 / Released: 22 Jul 2017

Words by David Jenkins

Directed by Basil Dearden

Starring Dennis Price, Dirk Bogarde, and Sylvia Syms

Man in dark suit standing in room with woman in background, black and white image.
Man in dark suit standing in room with woman in background, black and white image.
4

Anticipation.

Often seen as one of British idol Dirk Bogarde’s most important and personal roles.

4

Enjoyment.

The subject remains extremely powerful, even if it – cinematically speaking – it’s a very straightforward story.

4

In Retrospect.

The film’s presentation of sexual oppression remains shockingly relevant to this day.

A wel­come re-release of Basil Dearden’s chill­ing sur­vey of life as a gay man in Lon­don of the ear­ly 60s.

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 50th 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.

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