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Victim (1961)

Dir: Basil Dearden

Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde) is a successful, destined for big things, lawyer.
He has a pretty wife (Sylvia Syms) and an unstained reputation.
He’s also a Homosexual and in the UK, in 1961, that means possible prison time if sexually active, a probable loss of job and definite loss of status and a new occupation as social pariah.
All of which makes blackmail almost inevitable.

Barret (an excellent performance by Peter McEnery) is the young man in Farr’s life, but Farr has vowed to fight against his impulses for the sake of his wife and his reputation and so turns his back on Barrett, not knowing that Barrett is being blackmailed over photos of both of them together (of a non-sexual but intimate nature) and has had to rob his employer to get the money to pay the blackmailers, while still trying to protect Farr, the man he loves but who has turned him away.

When tragedy strikes Farr is forced to confront not only his own nature but also his guilt at turning Barrett away when he was desperate for help.
With help from Barrett’s friend Eddy (Donald Churchill) Farr determines to track down the blackmailers and as he embarks on his quest he discovers the true size of the blackmail plot, the damage it has done and the great risk of having everything he’s ever worked for destroyed if he wants to see the guilty brought to justice….

 

Few films make a real difference in the real world. “Victim” was one of those few though as it's effect on the public was heavily rumoured to have helped get the law of the land changed.
For many in Britain, who at the very least probably shrugged as being no big thing that sexually active Homosexuality was illegal and that men could got to jail for simply living their lives like anyone else, this film must have come as an unexpected shock at what the real effect of such a law has on those who, through no fault of their own, become victims of it.

And let’s not beat around the bush here, Janet Green and John McCormick’s screenplay makes it clear that the many ‘victims’ in the film are not just victims of the blackmailers but victims of the law.
But even that is not enough for them or director Basil Dearden as the wife character played by Syms shows that there are even more victims…those victims who become collateral damage as the loved ones around them are forced to lead shadowy lives at the threat of total social destruction. A destruction that will cause dreadful damage to anyone near them if their Homosexuality comes out.

The makers know that if the film was nothing but a soapbox sermon (there are moments here where this happens, as characters deliver lines that do sound more like a speech than a conversation, but given the time and the subject there was perhaps no other way to get certain vital points across) then people would have tuned out and felt cheated, even angered, as they ultimately came for a night out at the cinema.
But within this plea for justice and change is a genuinely intriguing crime story that plays by old and expected rules to deliver a solid thriller with many a neat twist during the extended finale which any crime movie fan will appreciate.

But above all is the plight of the homosexual for simply existing.
When one old, tired, scared blackmail victim (who does not want to help Farr’s investigation because he just wants to flee abroad ) announces that he has been sent to prison 4 times and simply can’t take it happening again your blood boils at the fact that a man simply being attracted to other men sees him stuck with not only a criminal record for the rest of his life, but thrown into prison with murderers, bank robbers and rapists on a regular basis.
And when shockingly the fear of the law is greater than the fear of the criminal we see the damage that the criminal does, the threat they offer, the havoc their blackmail plays on the victim’s everyday life as he finds himself literally stuck between a rock and a hard place. The fact an otherwise law abiding victim of a crime dare not go to the Police for fear that the Police will be the greater threat to his life and liberty is a shocking indictment of the society that makes such laws the Police have to uphold.
And the fact that their sex life, their love life, is a criminal act sees Homosexuals who have managed to avoid blackmail simply looking over their shoulders, meeting in secret and hoping beyond hope that their friends and employers don’t find out that they are one of ‘those’ who society has deemed legally unacceptable.

You can see why some people criticise the film as showing Homosexuals as victims, but basically all Homosexuals were victims then. Which is the explicit the point the film explicitly has to portray.
Even if Gay men were not blackmail victims, or general victims made to live false lives in fear of the society that criminalizes them, if they were in fact famous and successful say they still had to keep their Homosexuality as a pantomime, a light entertainment front to please film and TV audiences while ensuring that the actual, personal, real life, truth of their sex lives (that people may well guess at but do not want to be made explicit) never escape away from their acts.
People like Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howard and Noel Coward were all suspected or known to be Homosexual and yet were well loved, but none of them could ever have lived an openly Homosexual life that was in completely in the open, just like anyone else.
Just like most of their audiences and fans.
Let us not forget that while people laughed at these ‘camp’ performers, for much of their professional life the actual sex (and as such love) lives of these men, these stars, was still something that could find them arrested and locked up in a prison cell.
So even those Homosexuals popular and powerful enough not to live their lives in the shadows were still victims of a law, a so called morality, that effected no one else in the country.
The final irony is perhaps that Bogarde himself was never able to openly admit to his much rumoured Homosexuality due to the stigma it still carried decades later.

The screenplay deftly tackles anther problem as well. That of misplaced and inappropriate sympathy.
The woman in the local pub, the sympathetic Police Inspector (a nice turn by John Barrie) all feel it unfair that the men are persecuted but at the same time they use descriptions like ‘abnormalities’ and ‘they can’t help it’. The kindness is there but it’s a kindness of the kind shown to a lame dog, a person with a disease. They basically think that the law should not persecuted those afflicted with a harmless abnormality.
The casting of such a strong, respected and popular actor as Dirk Bogarde and the fact he plays a successful, educated, pillar of society means we are shown that there is nothing abnormal, weak or ailing about someone who is Homosexual. No more than any Heterosexual man at least.
Sure this stuff is spread on pretty thick and is at times very melodramatic, but the kid of message the film needed to spread, at such a time to such an amount of ordinary people meant that anything too subtle just wouldn’t work the way it might now.

The only thing that the film doesn’t tackle (for valid reasons) is that perhaps Farr could be Bi-Sexual. His marriage seems to have been as happy as it could be given the circumstances, Farr obviously loves his wife and we have to assume that they had an at least satisfying sex life, as Syms’ gives no signals that the marriage was in any way a failure in bed. But Bi-Sexuality would have weakened and diluted the film’s main purpose so the possibility of it is rightfully ignored.

Using the expert eye of Cinematographer Otto Heller (“Peeping Tom”, “The Lady Killers”) to give his tale a stark black and white look that mixes stark reality with Noirish lighting, Director Dearden (a stalwart of golden era English cinema, “The Blue Lamp”, “The Black Sheep of Whitehall”) expertly utilises his superb cast, all in top form, to put across not just a plea for change but to also make an exciting, moving and dramatic film in its own right.

Another shock for the general Brit cinema goer would have been the popular actor Dirk Bogarde playing the wounded, torn but defiant Farr.
For many Bogarde was two specific, different, but utterly acceptable actors. He was the charming comedy actor from the bonafide English comedy classic “Doctor in the House” (and 2 sequels) and he was the noble Englishman in such fare as the WW2 actioner “They Who Dare” or as the man who bravely makes the ultimate sacrifice in the stunning 1958 adaptation of “A Tale of Two Cities”.
But a look back at a very early Bogarde film, “The Blue Lamp”, shows that there was always a risk taking, deadly serious actor underneath the matinee idol persona.
In this classic 1950 movie he would be the gunman who did one of the most shocking things in the history of British cinema…he cold-bloodedly killed Dixon of Dock Green.
A Policeman character so massively popular that even death could not hold him, and (still essayed by the great Jack Warner) he would come back from the grave to star in an iconic British television series of the same name. But it was Bogarde who was willing to put a bullet hole in him.

But it was perhaps the film’s strongest weapon to have such a popular actor as Bogarde play someone so unpopular in society as a whole (or at least someone so willingly shoved into the sidelines) … that of the Homosexual man. But with Bogarde’s face up there people had to take notice, they had to listen.
And sure enough Bogarde is utterly magnificent. It’s hard to think that this is even the same actor who played broad comedy, as he’s so intense, so genuine in his hurt and anger .
He was fine and memorable in the serious “A Tale of Two Cities”, but until the end he had a roguish, playing to the audience in a way, character to essay, in “Victim” he is just a normal man. A respected, successful man who you may pass in the street on your way to the cinema…and yet he lives a life of utter emotional turmoil surrounded by victims like himself who he tries to ignore. Just as the audience try to ignore.
But you can’t ignore victims forever.
Bogarde would later become one of the world’s most respected serious actors in challenging films that pushed many kinds of boundaries (“The Servant”, “The Night Porter”, “Death in Venice”) and it is here, in “Victim”, where that truly great actor came alive.

The then strikingly beautiful Sylvia Syms ("Ice Cold in Alex", "Asylum"), in an astonishingly complex and difficult role, is also superb and her scenes with Bogarde are fascinating to watch (she always knew of Farr’s Homosexuality, but hoped to do that thing that many real women in love would hope to do,…She vainly hoped to help change him) and her character is obviously meant to represent the humanity and love that the film hopes all relatives and loved ones in real life would offer to their own family members who might be Homosexual and have no one else to turn to or get support from.
But she is no weak and winsome housewife and Syms ensures that we never feel she was blind and powerless as either a wife or a woman.

The support cast are all uniformly excellent and when I say that cast includes Norman Bird (”The Medusa Touch”, “Hands of the Ripper”), Nigel Stock (“The Dam Busters”, “Brighton Rock”), Derren Nesbitt (“Where Eagle’s Dare”, "The Playbirds", in wonderful form as a ruthless thug), Charles Lloyd Pack (“Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell”), John Cairney (“The Flesh and the Fiends”) and the troubled Dennis Price (“Kind Hearts and Coronets”, “Twins of Evil”), you can see why Bogarde and Syms are given such a strong backup.

So what we have is a fine film, a serious film, a superbly crafted film filled with excellent actors and with a startling lead performance by Dirk Bogarde.

And it’s also thankfully a film that’s now an historical document of how things used to be.
The law that criminalized Homosexuality is long gone, helped into its coffin in a small way by this film (even if it was a slow process, it took another 6 years after the film's release) due to the effect it had.
So it’s history, but it’s a history whose lessons were seemingly forgotten as the 21st century dawned;

With a 300% rise in attacks on Homosexuals in Scotland in 2007, with the main, rabidly homophobic, religions getting more and more powerful and influential in the UK (even Islam, to an hitherto unheard of degree. The only religion that still executes Homosexuals in its name), and given that equally homophobic right wing groups like the ‘British National Party’ are gaining popularity…it seems that the shadow of intolerance is growing in strength in the UK at a rate not seen for decades and as not one of these rising powers would shed a tear if Homosexuality was made illegal again (indeed if they all share a common enemy it is Homosexuality) it could be that the rock and a hard place existence I mentioned above could readily occur again.

“Victim” is a cinematically historical film and a socially historic film…And we should hang our heads in shame if the history it represents ever becomes the present once again.