When the British drama Victim was released in 1961, homosexual acts between consenting adults were still illegal in England, and though police had grown tired of prosecuting these victimless crimes, the British tabloids pounced on any sort of sex scandal, creating a rich market for blackmailers. Four years earlier, an influential government report had rejected the notion of homosexuality as a mental illness and recommended that it be legalized. Into this climate the Rank Organisation, a giant in British entertainment, cast Dirk Bogarde, the UK’s most popular matinee idol, as Melville Farr, a married, middle-aged barrister who’s being blackmailed for his romantic attachment to a young construction worker. “It is extraordinary, in this over-permissive age, to believe that this modest film could ever have been considered courageous, daring or dangerous to make,” Bogarde remembered in 1978. “It was, in its time, all three.”
A number of English actors turned down the role of Farr, including James Mason and Stewart Granger, and certainly Bogarde was sticking his neck out to play the character, given that he himself was living in the closet. “This is a marvelous part, and in a film that I think is tremendously important, because it doesn’t pull any punches,” he told a TV interviewer on the eve of the movie’s release. Bogarde reportedly wrote the pivotal scene in which Farr comes clean with Laura about his secret dalliance with Barrett, which means the actor may have been responsible for the movie’s roundhouse punch. When Laura demands to know why Farr broke off his relationship with Barrett, the even-tempered barrister finally explodes: “I stopped seeing him because I wanted him!”
Directed by Basil Dearden. 100 min.
