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Whitman · September 28, 2025

Whitman · September 28, 2025

Whitman · September 30, 2025

Whitman · October 1, 2025

Whitman · October 3, 2025

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

+ *Charlie* · October 3, 2025

2 hours ago, Whitman said:

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

Victim was the first film about gays that I ever saw. I took my best friend's sister with me to an art theater to see it. My best friend was gay, which she knew, and I'm sure it affected her attitude toward the fact.