Basil Dearden (1961)
Brian Robinson, introducing John Coldstream (as curator of the Dirk Bogarde season at BFI), informed us that Victim was a big box-office hit and in its opening weekend took more money than The Guns of Navarone. I left before the Q&A – including Coldstream and two of the film’s cast, Sylvia Syms and Peter McEnery – as the applause was ringing out in NFT1 (now with its new, very red seating). I probably should have stayed because there were at least two questions in my mind. Did audiences in 1961 flock to the film because they wanted to see a picture about homosexuality or Dirk Bogarde in a drama-thriller? And was the audience gathered for the film’s half-century acclaiming a piece of socially progressive propaganda or a work of art? It’s difficult, in a number of ways, not to respect Victim, and Bogarde for playing a role that was meaningful to him personally but which contradicted his screen image. The film, written by Janet Green and John McCormick, aims to be an unequivocal protest against the law of the land which made homosexuality a ‘blackmailer’s charter’. Victim – now the subject of a study by Coldstream (also Bogarde’s biographer) in the BFI Classics series – was initially banned in the USA; over here, the 1967 Sexual Offences Act passed into law slightly less than six years after its original release. I took with a pinch of salt John Coldstream’s view that Victim made a legal difference (his intro was admirably clear) but it can’t have done any harm – and the film is a masterpiece compared with, say, Losey’s anti-capital punishment piece Time Without Pity (1957). The plight of the Bogarde character, a brilliant lawyer called Melville Farr, whose sexuality threatens a stellar career at the bar, and the grinding unhappiness of most of the lives he touches, have an increasing emotional weight as the story progresses. Yet I also found Victim (which I’d seen before, but not for many years) a little annoying and rather ridiculous – thanks to its combination of melodrama and solemn rectitude.
The melodrama has some unfortunate effects. By the end of Victim, we’ve encountered so many homosexuals – some obviously gay, others in due course unmasked – that it’s hard to disagree when the vicious bigot who’s the prime mover in the blackmailing plot (a middle-aged spinster, played by Margaret Diamond) seethes that ‘They’re everywhere!’ An elderly hairdresser, four times imprisoned and now planning to get out of London and make a new life Canada, has a neatly-timed fatal heart attack when, shutting up shop for the day, he receives a menacing visit from the other blackmailer (Derren Nesbitt), a shades-wearing motorbike rider whose dodgy haircut is, in the circumstances, confusing. Each gay character is introduced by Basil Dearden in ways that are almost literally heavy-handed. Norman Bird as a secondhand bookseller has to make himself a cup of tea and pours milk from a bottle with a hard-to-miss tremor; Nigel Stock as a car hire salesman tamps down his pipe tobacco in a gesture of furious repression; the camera records these hand movements emphatically. There are one or two crappy ‘artistic’ flourishes. Farr’s wife Laura teaches disturbed children (presumably because she’s realised this is as close as she’ll get to having any kids of her own): we see a little boy doing a drawing of a face and then, as the watching Laura turns her attention to a newspaper with a story that increases her suspicion of what’s going on in her husband’s life, the boy obliterates the portrait with destructive brushstrokes.
The rectitude is embodied by Bogarde. He’d played Sydney Carton in the 1958 cinema adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities and here’s another ‘far, far better thing’ that he does, as Melville Farr tracks down the blackmailers and, in order to bring them to justice, sacrifices his own reputation. Farr’s rectitude has at least one reactionary effect. We’re given to understand that, although his friendships with men are somehow abnormal, he hasn’t actually had gay sex. The inadvertent implication is that his abstention from fully homosexual relationships raises his moral standing. The impact of Bogarde in this role must have been startling. It’s a comment on what he did subsequently that, within a decade, the casting would have seemed obvious. For that reason, it’s hard to look at his face here, peel away the layers of self-recrimination he constructed in later roles, and see it as freshly conscience-stricken. He’s expert but, if he’s affecting, I think that has more to do with the person we think Dirk Bogarde was offscreen. His essential problem here is that the screenplay is so preoccupied with its progressive message that the main characters are underwritten as human beings. Bogarde isn’t given the opportunities he deserves to dramatise what it means to Melville Farr to find his professional life, and the marriage that’s an intrinsic part of it, under siege. The political requirements of the project reduce the protagonist’s dilemma.
The same applies to the character of Laura, the judge’s daughter Farr wed when she was only nineteen – a marriage of convenience to her husband in more ways than one. When, near the end of the film, Laura asks her husband what he wants her to do, it reminds you that Victim is describing a social order which now seems benighted in terms of the balance of power between men and women, as well as sexual behaviour. Sylvia Syms is a limited and an obvious actress but she’s moving when she asks this question because she persuades you that Laura may not have an opinion of her own. However, the condition of the Farrs’ marriage isn’t well worked out (or conveyed at any rate) – again, one suspects, because the film-makers, although they’ve taken on a controversial subject, pussyfoot around some of its implications. Laura’s widowed brother (Alan MacNaughtan) tries to find out about the physical side of things between his sister and her husband; these siblings are so discreet in what they say that we’re none the wiser. If Laura were a more sophisticated woman you could believe that her reply to her brother – ‘Yes, it’s been all right’ – is a simple euphemism but Syms’ Laura seems too artless for any kind of subterfuge. That naivety makes it harder to believe too that (as we’re supposed to accept) she knew about Farr’s sexuality before they were married and accepted it. Is it likely that a protected upper middle-class teenage girl of the fifties would have known much, if anything, about homosexuality? It’s nearly incredible that Laura would have had the self-confidence to think she could get it out of her husband’s system.
When I wrote a note on The League of Gentlemen the other week, I wondered whether Philip Green’s martial score, although Basil Dearden used it effectively, would have been any different in a film that was straightforwardly admiring of British military men. Green’s excessively ominous music here, especially in the early stages, could hardly have been higher-pitched if Victim had been a send-up of a dark secrets thriller; and Dearden, perhaps because he believed strongly in the message of the film, tends to overdo things. Some of the playing in the smaller parts may be relatively strong because the director thought these roles less important and the actors are less pressured in them. Hilton Edwards and David Evans are especially good as a camp couple who turn out to be engaged in a form of extortion other than the central blackmailing. They sit and eavesdrop conversations in a pub whose regulars include some other vivid characters – a blowsy, middle-aged bottle blonde (Mavis Villiers), and Donald Churchill as the pal of ‘Boy’ Barrett (Peter McEnery), the young man Melville Farr got too friendly with but who tried his best to keep the blackmailers off the barrister. It’s Barrett’s suicide in a police cell that draws Farr inescapably into the intrigue. Anthony Nicholls and Peter Copley are covertly gay pillars of the legal establishment, Dennis Price a well-known actor who’s part of the same clique. Charles Lloyd Pack is a frightened barber. The two policemen on the case are a liberal-minded detective inspector (well played by John Barrie) and his puritanical sidekick (badly played by John Cairney). Alan Howard has a cameo as a sexually ambiguous friend of Barrett’s, another married man.
3 August 2011
