‘I Realise Everything’. Dirk Bogarde In, As, Victim.
Occasional Hope Lies at 24 Frames and Periodical contributor Neil Fox here discusses at length his passion for Basil Dearden’s Victim.
I’m repeatedly drawn back to this film more and more over time for a variety of reasons. I’m excited to explore and touch upon them as the film is released on Blu-ray as part of Network’s increasingly interesting The British Film collection.
For me Victim stands as one of the finest British films ever made. It features a brilliant performance by one of our greatest stars and it is a performance that can’t help but be entwined with the personal life of said star due to the content of the story. There’s also that content, which is mostly without sermon despite a social message inherently tied to the time of production at least in a British context. The success of the film is largely thanks to a plot that is masterfully woven by the screenwriters Janet Green and John McCormick so that the film remains a slow burning mystery thriller right to the last with MacGuffins and twists skillfully laced throughout. This draws focus away from moralising at key points when the film faces the potential to become heavy handed. Ultimately there’s the sad fact that despite sweeping improvements for homosexuals in Britain and the West there are still hurdles to overcome elsewhere and what is represented here in terms of persecution and vilification is sadly commonplace still in many parts of the world. This ensures the film retains a vitality that makes for great cinema but not a great society.
It is a deftly delivered blackmail mystery that through a disciplined expositional structure alongside some cute jump cuts and action cover-ups ensures that the identity of the blackmailers on the trail of the young man and then on the receiving of a vengeful hunt by Dirk Bogarde’s high profile barrister is always at arms length. Wonderfully, it could be anyone we encounter and the writers really understand mystery structure because the finale is completely gratifying. It allows the film’s context to complement and not control proceedings, resulting in a completely satisfying piece of entertainment with a conscience.
For the uninitiated, Peter McEnery is Jack ‘Boy’ Barrett, a young homosexual man who is a prominent part of an underground by necessity gay scene in London in the early 1960s. At the outset of the film he is on the run from the police after it is discovered he has been stealing from his employers to pay off blackmailers. Blackmail was a roaring trade in the days when homosexuality in Britain was still illegal. He asks for help from Dirk Bogarde’s barrister Melville Farr. Farr is Boy’s former lover and believes ‘Boy’ is trying to blackmail him. The reality is ‘Boy’ is trying to warn him that it is Farr whom he is trying to protect.
Captured by the police ‘Boy’ hangs himself in his cell and spurred by guilt and grief Farr sets out to uncover the blackmailers. It soon becomes clear ‘Boy’s’ case was not unique but Farr is resolute even though he knows it will destroy his marriage and career at the very moment he is about to make QC. The question of who is behind the blackmail burns in Farr’s mind and in the audience’s too, but also present is the question of who else is hiding what contemporarily was considered a shameful secret. Turns out, most of the men in the film share the secret and it’s in this powerful and steady stream of revelation that much of the film’s power lies.
At the heart of the film is Bogarde as Farr, a man who has spent his life creating a career in justice, creating a façade of idyllic happiness and fighting his own nature and denying his own desire and sexuality. It’s impossible to not read Farr as entwined with Bogarde. Dirk Bogarde was a film star whose sexuality was consistently under scrutiny and who lived through the homosexual witch-hunts that the film deals with. He knew firsthand the fear of ‘coming out’, not only on his career but also on his personal liberty. The dignity shown throughout by Farr — mostly, on occasion his angry humanity rears its head — again feels close to the dignity shown by Bogarde throughout his life. It is a life that in retrospect can be viewed as being spent without the freedoms and access to peace and happiness that so many of us take for granted. His sacrifice in the film is human and the hurt caused is not merely upon him but through circumstance and forced choices, by him. The photography by the brilliant Otto Heller and Basil Dearden’s thoughtful direction ensure that Farr is almost always in shadow, never able to be in the light for more than a fleeting moment. It’s achieved with subtlety and great craft and has a powerful impact. It draws the audience into what Bogarde is doing which is never less than sensational. He is troubled, angry, defiant, scared and sad but never pointed or obvious. A beautiful star and a tremendous actor.
The story is framed by some delightful lighting that conjures everything from Noir, through expressionism to melodrama and a score which never shies from hammering home the danger, threat and horror of the situation the young and scared ‘Boy’ finds himself in. The surrounding characters in the film are a brave blend of conservative and liberal, hateful and rational that gives the film real potency. Contemporarily there was no real consensus on the ‘rights’ or ‘wrongs’ of homosexuality and in these conflicting and conflicted characters we can see resonance in the modern day in places such as Uganda. And it’s not as if homophobia has been eradicated from our ‘enlightened’ island or its Western counterparts.
As such the release of Victim in a stunning transfer is welcome, not only for its cinematic virtues which are vast, but for its still important and powerful social critique. Oh that we could live in a world where these ideas seem hokey and archaic and the likes of ‘Boy’, Farr and Bogarde himself could live as they pleased.
Neil Fox is a writer on film based in the south of England. He can be found here.
