DIRK BOGARDE (1921-1999) IN BASIL DEARDEN's 1961 FILM VICTIM
Basil Dearden’s 1961 film, Victim, represents a significant moment in British film history. Released into a world where sex between adult men in the United Kingdom was a heavily policed crime, it is the first British film to use the word homosexual inside a narrative that thoughtfully and unsensationally captures the cumulative daily stresses and deadly effects of the law.
Under the guise of a thriller, Victim addresses how the criminalization of homosexuality made gay men, as a character says, the victims of “any cheap thug who finds out about our natural instincts.” The law was effectively a license for blackmailers; this constant threat of exposure and extortion is built into the film’s fabric from its opening scene, where Philip Green’s ominous piano score sets a tone of fear and paranoia. In a line of dialogue drawn from fact, we learn that as many as 90 percent of all British blackmail cases at this time had a homosexual origin. Dearden’s film is shaped by outrage, which caught the public imagination – Victim has been cited as one trigger for the Sexual Offences Act, which eventually decriminalized homosexuality in Britain in 1967.
SOURCE: sensesofcinema.com, 2021
