Movie Review - Victim

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Spoiler alerts A gritty realistic British thriller from 1961 that dared to tackle a very taboo subject – Homosexuality, at a time when being an openly practicing gay man was still a criminal offence. The unjust laws were seen by many sympathetic gay rights activists as a blackmailer’s charter and many prominent homosexual were hounded relentlessly by unscrupulous blackmailers. When his own lover is driven to suicide in the police cells, Dirk Bogarde’s Barrister, on the brink of being elevated to the status of a judge himself, goes on a crusade against the blackmailers responsible, even though exposing them will mean drawing attention to his own homosexuality and ruining both his career and his marriage. The police are portrayed as sympathetic to the gay men they are obliged to arrest in keeping with the law, while the blackmailers are een as vile, repulsive homophobic and just plain nasty. The film risked censorship to tackle its subject matter head on, and it was banned for years in the US. A powerful today as when it was made, with great performances by Bogarde and Dennis Price. Arthur Chappell