Victim movie review & film summary (1961)

The movie, written by Janet Green and John McCormick, plays out primarily in a series of dialogue scenes, made rich by the gallery of British character actors who inhabit them. The best is Norman Bird, as the used-book dealer, who turns Barrett away but whose feelings about him (and Farr, as it turns out) are more complicated than it seems.

The book man is one of the contacts Farr calls on in his own investigation; working with a few names supplied by one of Barrett's straight friends, he tries to get someone to say how and when he makes blackmail payments. Almost all the victims are afraid to, and one, an elderly barber named Henry (Charles Lloyd Pack), fiercely tells Farr he has been to prison twice because of his nature, and does not intend to go again.

The photography places this action colorfully within a living, breathing London; it has a feel for the way its characters live and speak. For Pauline Kael, the British speech mannerisms of some of the characters made them seem, to her, more gay than the low-key Bogarde, and indeed we cannot always guess who is hunter and who is quarry. There is a subtle subplot, for example, suggesting that one of the policemen on the case may be gay himself.

For Dirk Bogarde (1921-1999), the role in "Victim" provided a decisive break in his career. He'd been a popular leading man in the 1950s, playing conventional action and romantic roles and even making those "Doctor" comedies ("Doctor in the House," "Doctor at Sea," and "Doctor at Large"). To play a homosexual in 1961 would bring an end, his agent warned him, to those kinds of mainstream roles, and make him unemployable in Hollywood just at the moment when American directors were interested in him.

But he went ahead anyway, just as Melville Farr did, and indeed never again appeared as a conventional male lead. That turned out, oddly, to be the key to his greatest success; at a time when his stock as a conventional leading man would probably have been falling, he was able, having broken free, to work in one challenging film after another: "The Servant" (1963), "King & Country" (1964), "Darling" (1965), "Accident" (1967), "The Fixer" (1968) Visconti's "The Damned" (1969) and "Death in Venice" (1971), Resnais' "Providence" (1977) and Fassbinder's "Despair" (1979).

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