Welcome to The Weekend Watch, a weekly column focusing on a movie—new, old or somewhere in between, but out either in theaters or on a streaming service near you—worth catching on a cozy Friday night or a lazy Sunday morning. Comments welcome!
As we enter the 1960s with this week’s film, it may feel like The Weekend Watch’s Pride month has been heading back in time week by week, regressing to more and more closeted eras in cinema. And, while that might generally be true, our topic today—Basil Dearden’s 1961 drama Victim—is searingly ahead of its time. A righteously indignant and unrepentantly tragic attack on the British legal system that made it incredibly easy to convict and punish men who have sex with men, Victim is a thoroughly sympathetic and hard-edged noir all about blackmail and being boxed in by the law when you’ve already been boxed in all your life. You can find Victim streaming on Max, TCM and Criterion, and available to rent through Amazon.
To understand Victim, you have to first understand the legal environment of the U.K. at the time. Because it was so simple to press charges against men for “gross indecency” and ruin their public lives (this was the same law that sent Oscar Wilde to prison and killed Alan Turing), the mere threat of exposure was enough. You didn’t need to prove sodomy, you just had to imply any level of queerness. Aside from that, the eventual verdict didn’t matter. Guilt was implied. Therefore, this state of affairs led to the law being known as the “blackmailer’s charter.” If a criminal could find a closeted man, they’d got themselves a nice little income stream for however long they could put the squeeze on him.
This is just one of the threatening engines driving the nonstop Victim. Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde) is a lawyer on the rise, on the brink of a judgeship. He’s also recently cut off an affair with a strapping young construction worker. Farr’s career and marriage are on the line, but so too is his loyalty to a queer community he’s been denying all his life. These characters—a barber, an actor, a bookstore owner, a barful of quipping queens—invigorate the film with complex responses to the ever-looming threat of detection, but they’re also consumed with passion, focused on retirement, or shooting the breeze. As Farr investigates the people tormenting his ex-fling, he finds a whole multifaceted world waiting for his arrival.
Married couple Janet Green and John McCormick’s script is deeply empathetic as it draws out these characters and Farr’s place within them, but it never sacrifices pace. This is a brisk 96-minute mystery, where cops are always looking for someone and secrets are always on the brink of being spilled. A few flinty twists (and one iffy red herring) keep the energy up, while Dearden’s stark close-ups and moody lighting make most conversations feel life-and-death. It’s all orbiting around Bogarde’s angry, tormented performance—one similar and complementary to the queer-coded turn he’d give in The Servant just a few years later.
How Bogarde interacts with the police (one surprisingly tolerant cop and one bigot), his wife (Sylvia Syms, who gets a meaty role that’s more than the long-suffering spouse) and the criminals out to blow up his life (one particularly memorable for his motorcycle goggles) tracks all the different shames and prides and masks he wears in his life as a closeted man. It’s a hell of a job, but one which he easily works thanks to a shockingly, radically progressive screenplay.
In fact, Green and McCormick’s script was intended as a reformist art piece. Green had written Dearden’s anti-racist Sapphire in 1959 and wanted to push back on Britain’s antiquated laws. By cleverly (and, one must say, quite Britishly) playing coy around the physical aspects of gay life, Victim was able to address its topic head-on. As long as there wasn’t sex, it could play. That said, the British Board of Film Censors gave the tolerant (and deeply buttoned-up) film an X rating, the one usually saved for skin flicks and the nastiest horror. Stateside, the MPA completely denied it approval—it was just too frank about its subject matter.
But Victim was always going to have more of an impact on its home country anyway. It’s British to its bones, gaining its power from the politeness and euphemisms eventually falling away when times get desperate and decorum is blasted away by raw human need. One of the first British films to deal so explicitly with homosexuality did so with compassion, which helped humanize in the eyes of the public those whose very existence had been deemed illegal. All that, and it’s a great movie too.
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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