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Victim is a
1961 British suspense film directed by Basil Dearden and starring Dirk Bogarde
and Sylvia Syms. It was the first English-language film to use the word
"homosexual". It premiered in the UK on 31 August 1961 and in the US
the following February. On its release in the United Kingdom it proved highly
controversial to the British Board of Film Censors, and in the U.S. it was
refused a seal of approval from the American Motion Picture Production Code.
A
successful barrister, Melville Farr has a thriving London practice. He is on
course to become a Queen's Counsel and people are already talking of his being
appointed a judge. He is apparently happily married to his wife, Laura.
Farr is
approached by Jack "Boy" Barrett, a young working class gay man with
whom Farr has a romantic friendship. Farr rebuffs the approach, thinking
Barrett wants to blackmail him about their relationship. In fact, Barrett has
been trying to reach Farr to appeal to him for help because he has fallen prey
to blackmailers who have a picture of Farr and Barrett in a vehicle together,
in which Barrett is crying with Farr's arm around him. Barrett has stolen
£2,300 (£51,600 today) from his employers to pay the blackmail, is being
pursued by the police, and needs Farr's financial assistance to flee the
country. After Farr intentionally avoids him, Barrett is picked up by the
police, who discover why he was being blackmailed. Knowing it will be only a
matter of time before he is forced to reveal the details of the blackmail
scheme and Farr's role, Barrett hangs himself in a police cell.
Learning
the truth about Barrett, Farr takes on the blackmail ring and recruits a friend
of Barrett's to identify others the blackmailers may be targeting. The friend
identifies a barber who is also being blackmailed, but the barber refuses to
identify his tormentors. When one of the blackmailers visits the barber and
begins to destroy his shop, he suffers a heart attack. Near death, he phones
Farr's house and leaves a mumbled message naming another victim of the
blackmailers.
Farr
contacts this victim, a famous actor, but the actor refuses to help him,
preferring to pay the blackmailers to keep his sexuality secret. Laura finds
out about Barrett's suicide and confronts her husband. After a heated argument,
during which Farr maintains that he has kept the promise he made to Laura when
they married that he would no longer indulge his homosexual attraction, Laura
decides that Farr has betrayed that promise in having a relationship with
Barrett and decides to leave him.
The
blackmailers vandalise Farr's Chiswick property, painting "FARR IS
QUEER" on his garage door. Farr resolves to help the police catch them and
promises to give evidence in court, despite knowing that the ensuing press
coverage will certainly destroy his career. The blackmailers are identified and
arrested. Farr tells Laura to leave before the ugliness of the trial, but that
he will welcome her return afterward. She tells him that she believes she has
found the strength to return to him. Farr burns the suggestive photograph of
him and Barrett.
Homosexual
acts between males were illegal in England and Wales until the 1967 Sexual
Offences Act, which implemented the recommendations of the Wolfenden report
published a decade earlier. The fact that willing participants in consensual
homosexual acts could be prosecuted made them vulnerable to entrapment, and the
criminalisation of homosexuality was known as the "blackmailer's
charter". Homosexuals were prosecuted and tabloid newspapers covered the
court proceedings. By 1960, however, the police demonstrated little enthusiasm
for prosecuting homosexual relations. There was an inclination to "turn a
blind eye" to homosexuality, because there was a feeling that the legal
code violated basic liberties. However, public opprobrium, even in the absence
of criminal prosecution, continued to require homosexuals to keep their
identity secret and made them vulnerable to blackmail. The film treats
homosexuality in a non-sensationalised manner.
Scriptwriter
Janet Green had previously collaborated with Basil Dearden on a British "social
problem" film, Sapphire, which had dealt with racism against
Afro-Caribbean immigrants to the United Kingdom in the late 1950s. After
reading the Wolfenden report and, knowing of several high-profile prosecutions
of gay men, she became a keen supporter of homosexual law reform. She wrote the
screenplay with her husband John McCormick. Despite its then controversial
subject, it was in other respects quite conventional in being quite chaste.
Farr has not had sex with Barrett, nor with the man he loved at university. The
audience is allowed just one glimpse of a photo of two heads: Farr and Barrett
seen from the obverse of the print, and the screenplay underscores the fact
that only Barrett's tears suggest anything untoward, along with the breaking of
social taboos in that they are different classes and far apart in age. Also,
the film promises that Farr and Laura will remain united and faithful to one
another.[5] As Pauline Kael wrote:
The hero of
the film is a man who has never given way to his homosexual impulses; he has
fought them–that's part of his heroism. Maybe that's why he seems such a stuffy
stock figure of a hero... The dreadful irony involved is that Dirk Bogarde
looks so pained, so anguished from the self-sacrifice of repressing his
homosexuality that the film seems to give rather a black eye to heterosexual
life.
The
language the screenplay used to describe its controversial subject attracted
comment. It used "the familiar colloquial terms", wrote one reviewer
without specifying them, even as he referred to "homosexuality",
"the abnormality", and "the condition". The term
"queer"–then a pejorative term not yet adopted by advocates for LGBT
rights–is used several times in the film. "FARR IS QUEER" is painted
on Farr's garage door. Farr and other characters use the term. The more polite
"invert" appears as well.
When the
team of producer Michael Relph and director Basil Dearden first approached
Bogarde, several actors had already turned down the role, including Jack
Hawkins, James Mason, and Stewart Granger. In 1960, Bogarde was 39 and just
about the most popular actor in British films. He had spent fourteen years
being cast as a matinée idol by The Rank Organisation. He had proven himself
playing war heroes (The Sea Shall Not Have Them; Ill Met by Moonlight); he was
the star of the hugely successful Doctor film series; and he was a reliable
romantic lead in films like A Tale of Two Cities. He was flirting with a larger,
Hollywood career by playing Liszt in Song Without End. British audiences had
named him their favourite British film star for years. Bogarde was suspected to
be homosexual, lived in the same house as his business manager, Anthony
Forwood, and was compelled to be seen occasionally in public with attractive
young women. He seems not to have hesitated to accept the role of Farr, a
married lawyer with a homosexual past that he has not quite put behind him.
Bogarde himself wrote the scene in which Farr admits to his wife that he is gay
and has continued to be attracted to other men despite his earlier assurances
to the contrary.[9] In his first independent film project in his 34th film, he
said in 1965, "For the first time I was playing my own age. At Rank, the
fixed rule was that I had to look pretty. Victim ended all that nonsense."
He wrote years later in his autobiography that his father had suggested he do
The Mayor of Casterbridge, "But I did Victim instead, ... playing the
barrister with the loving wife, a loyal housekeeper, devoted secretary and the
Secret Passion. It was the wisest decision I ever made in my cinematic life. It
is extraordinary, in this over-permissive age [c. 1988], to believe that this
modest film could ever have been considered courageous, daring or dangerous to
make. It was, in its time, all three."
Similarly,
though several actresses had turned down the role, Sylvia Syms readily accepted
the part of Laura, married at age 19 and childless, which required her to be at
times frustrated and self-assertive and at others heroically sympathetic. Other
gay cast members included Dennis Price and Hilton Edwards.
Syms later
recalled that filming had to be completed in just ten days. Shooting locations
included The Salisbury, a pub on St Martin's Lane in the Covent Garden area of
London. The project was originally entitled Boy Barrett and the name changed to
Victim late in production. Relph and Dearden acknowledged that the film was
designed to be "an open protest against Britain's law that being a
homosexual is a criminal act".
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SEE ALSO:
Victim
review – groundbreaking gay thriller given timely rerelease
5 / 5
stars5 out of 5 stars.
Dirk
Bogarde’s elegant, sensitive portrayal of a man coming to terms with being gay
played a vital role in the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality
Peter
Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1
Thu 20 Jul
2017 15.30 BSTLast modified on Mon 3 Dec 2018 15.20 GMT
Basil
Dearden’s icily brilliant mystery thriller Victim from 1961 is now rereleased
in cinemas, linked to the Gross Indecency season at BFI Southbank, London. Dirk
Bogarde is the barrister Melville Farr, haunted by his (unconsummated) gay
desires – this in an era when gay sex was illegal – and threatened by a
sinister blackmail ring. The other blackmail victims include a stage star
played by Dennis Price, who was himself a gay man in that shabby, hypocritical
age. In the bankruptcy court, Price claimed his money worries stemmed from gambling,
though paying off blackmailers was another possible explanation.
Modern LGBT
audiences may not care for this film’s title, or its occasional bien-pensant
air of straight liberal concern for a psycho-medical “problem”. But the movie
played a vital part in the decriminalisation that came with the in 1967.
Bogarde is
gaunt, sensitive, elegant. His heartbreakingly trusting young wife Laura is
played by Sylvia Sims: the film leaves it to us to notice that she has a job
teaching disadvantaged children, but that they have no children of their own.
Dearden’s film conjures up the skin-crawlingly nasty and whispery world of
blackmail in the tatty streets of London’s West End. The film has hints of and , and I have long had the theory that the
elliptical language of gay pickups in an age of state-sanctioned homophobia is
something that inspired ’s language of enigmatic menace.
The
drum-tight drama has a couple of smart twists: its co-writer is Janet Green,
who scripted Midnight Lace. Bogarde has a kind of darkly troubled poise that is
utterly of its time. I wonder if Hugh Grant might study it as he prepares to
play Jeremy Thorpe in Stephen Frears’ forthcoming TV play A Very English
Scandal.
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