Background

Homosexual acts between males were illegal in England and Wales until the Sexual Offences Act 1967, 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".^[4] Homosexuals were prosecuted and tabloid newspapers covered the court proceedings. By 1960, however, the police demonstrated little enthusiasm for prosecuting those engaged in homosexual activity. 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.

The 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.^[5] 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. In addition, the film promises that Farr and Laura will remain united and faithful to one another.^[6] As Pauline Kael wrote:^[6]

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".^[4] 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.^[7] In 1960, Bogarde was 39 and just about the most popular actor in British films. He had spent 14 years being cast as a matinée idol by The Rank Organisation.^[8] 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 such as 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.^[9]

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.^[10]

Of his first independent film project in his 34th film, Bogarde 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."^[8] 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."^[7]

Similarly, though several actresses had turned down the role, Sylvia Syms readily accepted the part of Laura.^[11] English film critic Mark Kermode notes her reasons for this included previous theatre work with John Gielgud which exposed her to the laws surrounding homosexuality at the time, and that a family friend of hers had died by suicide after being accused of being gay. Consequently, she felt that the film's story had to be told.^[12] Other gay cast members included Dennis Price and Hilton Edwards.

Filming

Syms later recalled that filming had to be completed in just 10 days.^[13] Shooting locations included The Salisbury, Covent Garden.^[14] The project was originally entitled Boy Barrett and the name changed to Victim late in production.^[7] 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".^[4]

Legal representation of homosexuality

Victim displays an interesting layering of queerness with legal spheres by entangling issues of public and private spheres with homosexual men characters embodying a queer community. By placing the protagonist, Melville Farr, as Queen’s Council and as a closeted gay man, the movie renders him a cornerstone position for gay rights activism in legal spaces whilst also underlining the fragility of this closeted non-heterosexual conforming sexuality. This tension is considering the ambiguity of his experience of evolving in a space that discriminates against the very individuals that build up said system and create legislation perpetuating homophobic violence. Indeed, Mr. Farr gradually recognises the systemic privileges he holds by being a white middle-class abled-body man in the legal world in order to then utilise this power to further gay rights activism in justice systems ("I believe that if I go into courts as myself, I can draw attention to the fault in the existing law.").^[15]

Similarly, the legal central position of this protagonist is crucial to understanding his struggles with the jurisdiction system. Since being highly educated on the subject, he could represent a core activist in dismantling the heteronormative homophobic laws built by this power structure, but in reality, this character only faces the internalised discriminatory norms that he was taught to perpetuate in that institution. Therefore engaged in a helpless position, Bogarde’s character can only reproduce what he assimilated throughout the years and reapply these discriminating laws in his work. His figure speaks back to similar situations of all powerless homosexual men in legal settings having to choose between their career life or their romantic and sexual life as both cannot co-exist in the 20th-century legal field.

Through an intersectional lens, legal matters are entangled with questions of class. By being from a higher class, Mr. Farr had access to knowledge production on the subject of the law and therefore knows that his life is not at stake if his homosexuality is revealed; he will face public humiliation and a prison sentence. On the contrary, Barrett represents people from lower-income backgrounds and is uneducated on legal matters which renders him more vulnerable and explains his early death in the movie. Mr. Farr becomes aware of this unbalance because of class privilege when William (his butler) takes a look at the picture that Barrett believed enough to incriminate him and declares: "I see the implications [...] but this couldn't be the basis of any charge."^[16]

The underpinnings of the film lie in this tension between unfulfilled potential power and current dominant power structures that overthrow individuals’ willpower to change homophobic norms. Through Farr’s power in amending laws to foreground more homosexual-accepting legislation, the movie recognises that both closeted gay lawyers and the homosexual community outside of justice settings could benefit from these improvements brought by inner-law activists. The latter face the limitations of attempting to effect change from inside the institution. When Farr considers openly advocating for homosexual rights at the end of the movie, the emphasis is set on the consequences on his personal life, given that he will no longer be supported by his peers in the legal space. His position as a famous barrister throws him helplessly in the public sphere and his wife is aware of it: "You can't hope to keep this out of the press [...] you're too well-known."^[17] Homosexual legal activists like him have to sacrifice themselves by giving up on their privileges of being highly regarded legal individuals in law settings as Farr will inevitably lose his position in the firm (as Detective Harris acknowledges: "It seems tragic that your career has to go west [..]" ^[18]). Men like Melville are thereby understood to be conducting homosexual crimes and inevitably become outcasts from society.

Queer identities in public and private spheres

The main objective of the movie is to implicate public and private spheres considered by legal institutions with the question of homosexuality in the 20th century. In this matter, Farr embodies the many tensions observed between public and private legal spaces for he acts as a link between the legal world and the outside world. Indeed, his role as a barrister, businessman but also friend, husband and closeted homosexual interplays with public and private interests which endangers his status as a privileged man. Thanks to this position, he is the only one in the film to shed light on legal flaws on the subject of homosexuality to advocate for the cause; other homosexual men like Calloway, remain confined to the legal sphere to protect their private life and maintain their careers.

The private sphere represents a secure and safe space for closeted gay men in which they do not disclose the reality of their sexuality and benefit from heterosexual relationships to cover their homosexual selves. This is what Melville comes to challenge at the end of the movie by discussing his marriage with Mrs Farr; "I started this thing, I've hurt you terribly [...]",^[15] coming to the conclusion that deep down, both of them were aware of the subterfuge. On the contrary, the public sphere endangers homosexual individuals and forces them to face legal sentences of their actions when their sexuality is revealed. Mrs Farr brings up her concerns about her husband disclosing his homosexuality to the public as she is aware this "will destroy [him] utterly."^[17] For instance, it is mentioned that Henry, the hairdresser, has been convicted of homosexuality four times, underlining the effects of the public sphere on the private. In the same way, Barrett chose to commit suicide when realising that death was the only option other than going to prison as he feared his homosexuality had been disclosed to the public eye. This implies the imbalance between working-class and privileged middle-class homosexuals being outed in the public sphere; workers like Barrett and Henry face death whilst men like Melville are ostracised from society at worst. Hence why challenging the limit between both public and private spheres puts these men at risk even more; Melville Farr acknowledges this danger and still works towards advocating past the private sphere and crossing the boundary between both since he is aware of his privileges. This foreshadows the reality that the legal system can only be dismantled and challenged when joining and crossing both public and private spheres for its legislation impacts both spaces.

From there, the movie suggests that we read legal institutions as purposely withdrawing themselves from the public sphere by creating an inner-private sphere within its system to ensure the gatekeeping of its legislation and prevent individuals from amending its principles. Therefore creating a private sphere for lawmakers, which should be in the public sphere as it rules public settings, restrains outsiders to change its fundamentals. In Victim, Farr showcases this under-represented issue for being confined to this legal private sphere and thereby unable to push forward homosexual rights without breaking out of this space. When breaking free from this sphere to join both public and private, the latter challenges the superior authority of the law that is established to maintain closeted homosexual lawyers within the system to stop them from questioning and changing its set order. From a late 20th-century perspective, this advocacy for homosexual acceptance recognises that amending legal jurisdiction can only be possible by breaking the boundary between public and private spheres within the system itself. Therefore promoting hope for all homosexuals that they will not have to lose their identity in one of these two spheres because of their sexuality.

British censor

An official of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) had set out its view of homosexuality in film: "to the great majority of cinema-goers, homosexuality is outside their direct experience and is something which is shocking, distasteful and disgusting". Relph said that in Victim, by contrast: "What I think we want to say is that the homosexual, although subject to a psychological or glandular variation from sexual normality, is a human being subject to all the emotions of other human beings, and as deserving of our understanding. Unless he sets out to corrupt others, it is wrong for the law to pillory him because of his inversion." He said Victim was "a story not of glands but of love."^[7]

Although a number of controversial scenes were cut before the film's release during discussions with the BBFC, including scenes with teenagers,^[20] the BBFC nevertheless gave the film an "X" rating; that is, "recommended for adults only", a classification which was then usually given to erotica or horror films. In a letter to the filmmakers, the BBFC secretary raised four objections to the film. First, a male character says of another man: "I wanted him". Second, references to "self-control" in the revised script were omitted from the filmed discussion of homosexuality, leaving the discussion "without sufficient counterbalance". Third, the film implies that homosexuality is a choice, which "is a dangerous idea to put into the minds of adolescents who see the film". Finally, the one blackmailer who unleashes a tirade against homosexuality is so unsympathetic that the views expressed will be discredited.^[21]

U.S. censor

In the United States, the Motion Picture Association of America's Production Code Administration, the film industry's self-censorship board that enforced the guidelines established by the Motion Picture Production Code, denied Victim its seal of approval. A spokesperson cited the film's "candid and clinical discussion of homosexuality" and its "overtly expressed pleas for social acceptance of the homosexual, to the extent that he be made socially tolerable". He noted that the subject of homosexuality was acceptable under the recently relaxed Production Code if handled with "care, discretion and restraint".

The head of the U.S. distributor appealed the decision and announced the film would be released in February even if his appeal was denied. He described it as a "tasteful film on a delicate subject".^[22] A few years before the release of Victim, the filmmakers of Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) had persuaded the code censors to allow their film to use homosexuality as a plot device, but only by presenting it through cryptic innuendos, and film had to illustrate the "horrors of such a lifestyle".^[23] Victim, in contrast, was deemed to be too frank in its treatment of homosexuality, and not initially approved by the censorship code.

However, in 1962, the Hollywood Production Code agreed to lift the ban on films using homosexuality as a plot device. A few years later, the code was replaced by the MPAA film rating system, which introduced an age-appropriate classification system for films. As attitudes became more liberal, the rating classifications for the film were revised.

When Victim was released on VHS in the U.S. in 1986, it received the PG-13 rating.

Critical reception

British reviews praised Bogarde's performance as his best and praised his courage in taking on the role. A London magazine called it "the most startlingly outspoken film Britain has ever produced".^[9] An anonymous reviewer in The Times commented that "Victim may not say a great deal about" the related issues of the nature of 'love' and gay men's "genuine feeling" for each other, "but what it does say is reasoned and just; and it does invite a compassionate consideration of this particular form of human bondage".^[25] However the Sight and Sound reviewer Terence Kelly saw problems with the film, and wrote that Victim contains "a tour of the more respectable parts of the London homosexual underworld, with glimpses of the ways in which different men cope with or are destroyed by their abnormality". He did comment "the film unequivocally condemns the way" blackmail "is encouraged by the present state of the law".^[26]

Bosley Crowther wrote that the film "appears more substantial and impressive than its dramatic content justifies" because "it deals with a subject that heretofore has been studiously shied away from or but cautiously hinted at on the commercial screen". He thought the script "routine" and "shoddily constructed" as drama but successful as a political argument:^[4]

[A]s a frank and deliberate exposition of the well-known presence and plight of the tacit homosexual in modern society it is certainly unprecedented and intellectually bold. It makes no bones about the existence of the problem and about using the familiar colloquial terms. The very fact that homosexuality as a condition is presented honestly and unsensationally, with due regard for the dilemma and the pathos, makes this an extraordinary film.

He qualified his praise of Bogarde's acting: "Dirk Bogarde does a strong, forceful, forthright job, with perhaps a little too much melancholy and distress in his attitude, now and again." He summed up his mixed view: "While the subject is disagreeable, it is not handled distastefully. And while the drama is not exciting, it has a definite intellectual appeal."^[4]

Chris Waters however has argued that "Victim took for granted that homosexuality was a social problem that needed to be explored calmly and dispassionately" as a result of the "wake of the social dislocations associated with the war and the various anxieties to which they gave rise".^[27] He elaborates on this further by referring to Kenneth Soddy, a physician at the Department of Psychological Medicine at University College London Hospital, who wrote in 1954 that whilst homosexuality itself did not trouble the community, its "social disturbance" during the war caused "variations in social and sexual practices which engenders attacks of acute public anxiety."^[28] As such, he argues that the film portrays homosexuality in a sensationalised way which would have deliberately drawn public attention to the issue.

Before the film was released in the U.S., a news report in The New York Times described Victim as a political work: "the movie is a dramatized condemnation, based on the Wolfenden Report, of Britain's laws on homosexuality."^[22]

In relation to a BFI Southbank retrospective screening season of Bogarde's films, Peter Bradshaw argues that fifty years on, Victim does not function necessarily "as a study of homosexuality," but rather of "blackmail and paranoia." He points out the fact that Melville never engages in homosexual acts, but rather "appears" to have a "passionate, unconsummated infatuation with a young man at university..." then later a liaison with a "young building-site worker", both unconsummated arrangements to prove his interest. He argues Bogarde's lighting is more haunting than necessary in the confrontation scenes with his wife, and references the work of Patrick Hamilton, which often depicted "the seedy, nasty world of pubs and drinking holes around... London's West End", seen throughout the film that add to "the strange, occult world of blackmail, conspiracy and shame, and the seediness of a certain type of London, that Victim holds up best."^[29]

Victim became a highly sociologically significant film; many believe it played an influential role in liberalising attitudes and the laws in Britain regarding homosexuality.^[30] Alan Burton has also highlighted that in spite of attracting "much criticism and debate, largely in terms of its liberal prescriptions and its ‘timid’ handling of a controversial theme", confirmed in that a study that Victim had "significant impact on gay men who struggled with their identity and subjectivity at a time when their sexuality was potentially illegal".^[31]

Box office

The film was not a major hit, but it was popular, and by 1971, it had earned an estimated profit of £51,762.^[1][32]

Home media

The film was released as a DVD by the Criterion Collection in January 2011,^[33] as part of an "Eclipse" box set. The film was released as a Blu-ray by Network in July 2014.^[34]