Victim

VICTIM (PG)

D: Basil Dearden

Rank / Allied (Michael Relph)

UK 🇬🇧 1961

96 mins

Drama/Thriller

W: Janet Green & John McCormick

DP: Otto Heller

Ed: John D. Guthridge

Mus: Philip Green

Dirk Bogarde (Melville Farr), Sylvia Sims (Laura Farr), Dennis Price (‘Tiny’ Calloway), Anthony Nicholls (Lord Charles ‘Teddy’ Fullbrook), Peter Copley (Paul Mandrake), Norman Bird (Harold Doe), Peter McEnery (Jack ‘Boy’ Barrett)

One of the best British films of the early 1960s & the first mainstream release from the UK to deal with homosexuality in a tasteful and sympathetic way.

The film is almost styled as though it were a suspenseful Hitchcockian thriller, starring Dirk Bogarde as a closeted lawyer who becomes embroiled in a police investigation surrounding a blackmail cartel that is targeting gay men in the London area.

Filmed on location in Central & West London, the film provides a genuine time capsule of its times and presents its themes, controversial for the time, in an honest, dramatic and thought-provoking way.

Dirk Bogarde delivers a strong lead performance, but the entire ensemble are perfectly cast here, though the real star of the film is the screenplay by Janet Green & John McCormick, which you could say is years ahead of its time.

8/10