"This new film may shock my nice young doctor
public, but you can't go on making films just to please your fans. You can't
leave all the adult films to the French, Italian and Swedes"[1]
In 1960 nearly
all cases of blackmail in England and Wales were related to the victim being homosexual,
regarded by some sections of the public as a disease. Back then it was still against
the law, that was until the 1967 Sexual Offences Act which implemented the
recommendations of the 1957 Wolfenden report which in turn recommended that
homosexual behaviour between two consenting adults, over 21 and in private,
should no longer be a criminal offence. These changes were brought about because
of some very prominent cases involving well-known men!
 |
| Sylvia Syms as Farr's wife. |
Directed by
Basil Dearden and produced by Michael Relph, Victim (1961) was another
of the talented filmmaking pair’s ‘social problem’ movies that dealt with
subjects that many other filmmakers avoided. Films like A Place to
Go (1963), Violent
Playground
(1958) both dealt with the problems confronting youth culture and of cause Sapphire (1959) which tackled race relations
which was scripted by Janet Green who also scripted Victim having became a keen supporter of homosexual reform.
 |
| The police question Boy Barrett (Peter McEnery) |
Dirk Bogarde
was suspected to be homosexual because he lived in the same house as his
business manager Anthony Forwood, but obviously the Rank Organisation that
Bogarde had been contracted to for fourteen years was not happy that one of
their top stars was rumoured to be in a relationship with another man and
arranged for him to be seen with attractive and desirable young starlets. So
when Bogarde left Rank and accepted the role of the barrister Melville Farr a successful man with a loving
wife who had a secret passion and risks his career and marriage
to break an extortion racket when his young friend, a wages clerk on a building
site, commits suicide rather than implicate him in a blackmail scam. It was a very brave move on his part that could of
affected his career; the adulation from his female fans and worse could further
have fuelled the rumours about his sexuality.
 |
| Farr discovers the Barrett was not the only blackmail victim. |
Although this
was undoubtedly a controversial film for its time, and was initially banned in
the USA for being too explicit, it is now seen as one of Bogarde’s most
intelligent and tactfully performances of his career to date and although
loosing some of his young fan base, not due, it was alleged, to the fact that
he played a gay man but more to do with the fact that he played a character his
own age, forty and greying, it enhanced his reputation and Bogarde admitted
‘that it was the wisest decision he ever made in his cinematic life’[2]. His next big break, which
would place him at the very top of the league of British actors, came three
years later in the first of four films he made with Joseph Losey The Servant in 1963.
 |
| Mavis Villiers plays Madge, a woman with knowledge of who drinks at her favourite watering hole. |
It is notable that
Victim was the first English language
film to use the word "homosexual" and many believe that it played a
significant role in both liberalising attitudes and helping to change the
archaic laws dealing with same sex relationships, proving my theory that
filmmaking in the right hands can change things for the better.
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