Victim

Rating:
Summary: **** Movie and Extras; ** Quality of Transfer
Review: A groundbreaking film in its day because of its sympathetic treatment of homosexual themes, "Victim" may have lost some of its provocative edge, but it nonetheless remains a sophisticated and engrossing mystery. Both its plot and its political bent are neatly encapsulated in a line of dialogue near the end of the movie when one of the characters sagely notes that the British laws criminalizing consenting homosexual behavior provide a breeding ground for blackmailers. The story concerns a closeted and married barrister (Dirk Bogarde in a powerful and richly nuanced performance) who determines to bring the extortionists who were indirectly responsible for a former lover's suicide to justice, despite the attendant risks to his own career, social position, and marriage. His search through an underground London populated by blackmailers, their accomplices (both willing and unwitting), their victims, and the police is paralleled by his own emotional journey toward personal truth and self-understanding.

The Home Vision Entertainment release of this minor classic is far from perfect. Mastered from a print in the Janus Films collection, there are two major and very distracting breaks in the video that might easily have been repaired with minimum effort. And although the aspect ratio is indeed 1.66:1 as advertised, the film is not letterboxed; therefore, unless you own a widescreen television set, you will be viewing a print that appears to be full-frame but is in fact compressed from side-to-side, making the actors and sets appear unnaturally tall and narrow. Finally, the soundtrack is sometimes muddy and/or marked by background hiss that makes small stretches of dialogue incomprehensible. On the plus side, the DVD does include the Original Theatrical Trailer; brilliant and thoughtful liner notes by film historian David Thomson; and (best of all) a 1961 televison interview with Bogarde in which the actor offers insights into his career to date, as well as his thoughts on the pending theatrical release of "Victim". Recommended for the film itself and the extras ... but not for the overall quality of the DVD itself.


Rating:
Summary: Taut, well played film
Review: A landmark film in 1961, it brought homosexuality out into the open. Well written by Janet Green and John McCormick, the plot tells of a blackmail ring that involves the lives of many "victims". Peter McEnery is a young gay man who is blackmailed and is desperate to avoid his blackmailers and the police. Dirk Bogarde, in a daring move career wise, plays the closeted barrister Melville Farr who had a brief liasion many years ago with McEnery.
When McEnery needs his help, Bogarde rebuffs him which results in tragedy for the young man. As character after character become embroiled in this crime their lives start a downward spiral. Everyone in the film becomes a victim of this heinous crime.
Filmed in black and white against a grey London winter, the cinematography sets the right mood. Dirk Bogarde took quite a risk to play Melville Farr. Homosexuality was still very taboo and could have broken his career. Instead it opened up many more serious parts for him. His performance is intense and very downplayed. Sylvia Syms, as his loving wife, matches Bogarde's performance in quality. Her part could have become a bit melodramatic but Syms and director Basil Dearden avoided that pitfall.
This film also reminds viewers of the narrow thinking that prevailed in the early 60's. This was before Stonewall and Gay Liberation. In England you could be imprisoned for many years. The law was repealed in 1966. It is thought that this film was innovative in getting the repeal.

A bonus to the DVD is an interview with Dirk Bogarde.

Rating:
Summary: Taut, well played film
Review: A landmark film in 1961, it brought homosexuality out into the open. Well written by Janet Green and John McCormick, the plot tells of a blackmail ring that involves the lives of many "victims". Peter McEnery is a young gay man who is blackmailed and is desperate to avoid his blackmailers and the police. Dirk Bogarde, in a daring move career wise, plays the closeted barrister Melville Farr who had a brief liasion many years ago with McEnery.
When McEnery needs his help, Bogarde rebuffs him which results in tragedy for the young man. As character after character become embroiled in this crime their lives start a downward spiral. Everyone in the film becomes a victim of this heinous crime.
Filmed in black and white against a grey London winter, the cinematography sets the right mood. Dirk Bogarde took quite a risk to play Melville Farr. Homosexuality was still very taboo and could have broken his career. Instead it opened up many more serious parts for him. His performance is intense and very downplayed. Sylvia Syms, as his loving wife, matches Bogarde's performance in quality. Her part could have become a bit melodramatic but Syms and director Basil Dearden avoided that pitfall.
This film also reminds viewers of the narrow thinking that prevailed in the early 60's. This was before Stonewall and Gay Liberation. In England you could be imprisoned for many years. The law was repealed in 1966. It is thought that this film was innovative in getting the repeal.

A bonus to the DVD is an interview with Dirk Bogarde.

Rating:
Summary: Not quite your classic 1960's detective story
Review: Dirk Bogarde gives a tour-de-force performance as a lawyer being blackmailed after his lover's murder. For the sake of integrity, (Farr) Bogarde decides to track down his blackmailers and in the process comes out to a lot of people, including his wife...So what, right? Remember that "Victim" debuted in 1960's when the word "gay" was not used regularly in the U.S. A pioneering British effort to be sure. The treatment the situation receives is civil and realistic, devoid of morbidity. A must for film historians.

Rating:
Summary: Taut, well-acted, entertaining thriller
Review: Don't let the title mislead you. Victim is about a man who is anything but helpless. Dirk Bogarde, in a career-defining role, plays a highly respected, but closeted, attorney who risks his marriage and reputation to bring to justice an elusive blackmail ring terrorizing gay men (exposure then meant not only disgrace but prison), and which caused the young man he loved to commit suicide. In the early 1960s, director Basil Dearden's Victim was perhaps the most daring film yet to appear on the British screen. A surprise hit at the box office, many regard it as the work that finally stirred Parliament to begin amending Britain's draconian laws against "homosexual acts."

Historical importance aside, Victim still holds up as a taut and entertaining thriller, with excellent performances and some striking cinematography. After more than 40 years, actor Dirk Bogarde's protagonist remains one of the screen's few out and out gay heroes. He gives a richly nuanced, and powerful, performance. The film uses an unusual structural device: Melville Farr (Bogarde) and Jack Barrett (hauntingly played by Peter McEnery), the young man who loves him and whom he loves, never appear together onscreen. In fact, the first quarter of the film involves Jack's increasingly frantic attempts to contact the nervous Farr, who dodges him every way he can. While that "non-meeting" certainly upped the comfort level for many, it also provides a unique dramatic strength. Here absence is powerful in its suggestiveness. And as the film unfolds, we never forget that Farr's single-minded mission - in his role as part lovesick man, part avenging angel - is to bring to justice the blackmailers who drove Jack to kill himself.

As played by the handsome Peter McEnery, Jack comes across as a likable guy, unpretentious and authentic. We never doubt his feelings for Farr, or his genuine affection for the middle-aged men in love with him. And although Jack dies within the first half hour, he dominates the film, causing not only Farr but, on some level, the audience to ask, What injustice caused this affable young man to kill himself?

And that puts all of British society, both gay and straight, on trial. But it also causes the film's only dramatic limitation when, in the second half, polemics takes over. It tries to show the broad impact of homophobia on the widest possible socioeconomic range of characters, from both the straight and gay worlds. There are simply too many people, representing too many permutations of class and taste. However, there are some very powerful scenes, especially between Farr and his wife Laura (played with emotional complexity by the beautiful Sylvia Syms), as they work out the new contours of their marriage. But overall the film's second half was less effective than its first.

In the opening hour, Dearden brilliantly used cinematic means - expressive lighting, slightly off-kilter compositions, propulsive narrative rhythms, and jazzy music - to explore character and theme (all captured superbly in the DVD transfer). In the first half, I saw and felt what it was like to live in that tense world, while in the second half, I heard characters tell me about it.

Still, I highly recommend this film, not only for its historical importance to both GLBT cinema and rights, but because it is an engrossing, well acted and often strikingly shot film. And although the legal and social situation of GLBT people has improved markedly in the past four decades, there is still much emotional truth and insight in this landmark film.

Rating:
Summary: Haunting and challenging film . magnificent!
Review: In the early sixties it's hard for you to get a film so brave like this one. Bogarde is a homosexual who lives in the closet.
And this fact will be sparkling point , thrugh he'll be blackmailed .
In one of the excellent lines of this amazing script Bogarde staes: The fear is the oxygen of the extorsion.
Watch this brave film . Bogarde shows us he was an actor of depth and substance . After he would make The servant (see my review) where he would play a top notch performance under Joseph Losey' s direction. This movie may be well considered as the masterpiece of Basil Dearden.
And remind that Advise and consent , that unforgettable film of Otto Preminger deals with similar argument. Both of them belongs the same year.

Rating:
Summary: ten-letter word
Review: This film from the Rank organisation directed by Basil Dearden was a landmark in cinema history as allegedly the first to mention the ten-letter word "homosexual" (though the use of "queer" reads as more of a shock). "Gay" had got a lot of usage, in the 20's in innocence, and in the 30's with subtext, but it says something about the sexual prudism of American society that it was the British, of all people, to be the ones to open an adult conversation on the subject. The screenplay by Janet Green and John McCormick uses the thriller form to uncover the blackmail of homosexuals, since the laws that existed to prosecute practicing homosexuals was known as the "blackmailer's charter". The victims of both the legal system and the homophobic blackmailers presente here are all men, with no mention of whether this law also applied to lesbians, though presumably the offence they could be convicted of is less associated with women (and not uncommon in heterosexual behaviour). Since the writers make the main character a barrister, it's clear that the intention is law reform, but this ambition doesn't stop them from using cliched phrases, such as "horrid imaginings", "It used to be witches", "unfortunate devils", "They're good for a laugh but I hate their guts", "The invert is part of nature", and "I find love in the only way I can". The best line is delivered by a Noel Coward-ish actor (his character named is amusingly obscured by the sound of a passing tea trolley), "the rage of Caliban on seeing his own reflection in the mirror", but the worst is ironically delivered by the actor delivering the most interesting performance as a victim, with Charles Lloyd Pack's "Nature played me a dirty trick". Lloyd Pack gives "I'm going to be sensible" a funny intonation. An incriminating photograph of the barrister Dirk Bogarde with a "boy" he has in his car but has rebuffed, is never seen, which is a pity since we are told "there is as much pain in both faces". The screenplay also features a McGuffin subplot, and an odd cruising policeman (one wonders how far he would go with his spying) , but the lead blackmailer is given some nice touches with a motobike, s/m clothing, a fondness for boxing and classical music, and a framed picture of Michelangelo's David. What is interesting is how the writers condemn women as the worst type of homophobes, while at the same time giving Bogarde's wife (Sylvia Syms) such depth of feeling, probably as an acknowledgement that of the couple, she is one who has been deceived the most. Whilst I could have done without making her a teacher of "difficult children", the scene where Bogarde's involvement is exposed has her playing the prosecutor to his witness, with his climactic "I wanted him" yelled in shameful anger and along the same lines as his "If it was love why should I want to stamp it out?" In a role Bogarde declared altered his screen career for the better, he wears aged makeup and sports grey hair, apparently since a man at 40 has entered decay (or is just 40 year old closeted male homosexuals?), and whilst the barrister role allows him a dignified manner, I liked his smile upon being made aware of being in the same room as three less closeted male homosexuals, and the look on his face when he is asked if he knew the boy he had been seeing was homosexual and he replies "Yes, I had formed that impression". It's hard to imagine who the film-makers thought the audience for this film was, since the main character's denial of his sexual impulses insults gays, and as Pauline Kael said in her review to be found in I Lost it at the Movies, it also "gives a black eye to the heterosexual life, with the unwarranted assumption that that if homosexuality wasn't a crime, it would spread and heterosexuality would be unable to survive in a free market".

Rating:
Summary: Daring crime thriller
Review: Victim stands firmly in the crime thriller category, but the conventions of the genre are merely the occasion for a political plea to legalize homosexuality. It is a plea passionately and effectively delivered, albeit grounded in contemporary misguided assumptions, ie. that homosexuality is a perversion that is nevertheless incurable and ought to be tolerated as a compassionate concession to a tragic inevitability.

As a thriller it is interesting enough, though the characters are shallow, since their development is clearly subordinated to the socio-political message the film is trying to get across. This is compensated for by excellent production values, the style of which clearly belongs to the new wave of British realism in the mid-50s to '60s. Bogarde and Price also deliver fine performances.