A young man (Peter McEnery), who is mostly known as “Boy” Barrett receives a tip-off that the police are after him. He recently stole a large amount of money from his employers, which the authorities believe was to fund his lifestyle. What they don’t realize is that his reason for committing the crime was far more sinister – as a working-class gay man, he was part of a group of individuals secretly defying the laws of the United Kingdom, which saw homosexual activity as immoral and a crime that was severely punishable. Somehow, an anonymous individual had gotten hold of some proof, and decide to blackmail Barrett and his friends for enormous financial compensation, necessitating the theft. On the other side of the socio-economic ladder is Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde), who is a well-respected lawyer who has made many connections and is well on his way to becoming a judge. He is contacted by Barrett about his case, and he has good reason to reject it at first – despite being married, Farr had been in a long-term relationship with Barrett, and one of the reasons Barrett was contact him was to warn him that he was being blackmailed with photographs that depict the two of them during one of their rendezvous – and eventually, he finds that Barrett (faced with the fear of the consequences) committed suicide. Suddenly, Farr is thrust into the middle of a conspiracy, and despite pretending to simply only have a legal interest in the case, he finds himself becoming incredibly invested in solving this mystery, not only because it is right, but because his own life and career is entirely dependent on it. He needs to find the root of this blackmail before it’s too late, since he isn’t the only one in serious danger, as evident by the small panic circulating around the community.

Basil Dearden’s Victim is a film ahead of its time, which isn’t something one would necessarily expect from a film that appears, on the surface, to be nothing more than a traditional British drama about social order. We’re all aware of the criminalization of homosexuality in the United Kingdom, which only came to be repealed in the late 1960s – but seeing a work made that directly addresses it during this period is something else entirely. I can’t fully say that Victim manages to execute all of its ideas flawlessly, and there are certain aspects that feel not only profoundly dated, but also somewhat unnecessary, especially considering the depth that such a story already carried without needing some overriding commentary that felt somewhat misplaced. However, this isn’t to suggest that this film isn’t quite an achievement – everyone involved was taking something of a risk, and the result is a masterfully-constructed social drama masquerading as a compelling crime procedural, whereby Dearden and screenwriters Janet Green and John McCormick venture courageously into the cultural consciousness, plumbing emotional depths that weren’t very common at the time, and making some astonishing statements that feel incredibly invigorating, even by contemporary standards, whereby these issues are still very pressing, but perhaps not as massively as they were back then (at least not from a western standpoint). Victim is an incredibly important film, one that feels profoundly impactful without ever coming across as too overwrought, and combining some tremendous performances and a strong script, it’s easily able to overcome some of the more superficial flaws in favour of providing some intrepid commentary that is still profound moving all these decades later.

What is often most remembered about Victim is the performance given by Dirk Bogarde in the leading role. One of his generation’s most enigmatic actors, Bogarde was someone whose own personal life was deeply-guarded, with many aspects of his identity being intentionally concealed from the public. This makes his performance in this film even more striking, since he is playing a man who has to keep his own secrets in order to thrive in his career. It gives his work here even more nuance, since Bogarde’s own identity, while certainly not of any real importance, allowed him to find the intricacies in playing a man whose secrecy is not a choice, but a necessity. Moreover, on the pure level of the performance, Bogarde is doing something very impressive, finding the complexities in an otherwise ordinary figure, which was a characteristic of many of his greatest screen portrayals. Arguably, Victim doesn’t carry the prestige of some of his more notable work, such as The Servant or Death in Venice, so he doesn’t have a film that is immediately brilliant to use as a launching point for another compelling performance – instead, he is the reason why the film succeeds, with his portrayal of the closeted lawyer being the heart of the film. For the most part, he relies on a very subdued set of mannerisms, playing Farr with complete restraint and elegance – but it’s the moments where Bogarde unleashes the fury that Victim comes into its own, with his anger and despair commanding the screen, and being unexpectedly powerful, even considering how he’s an actor who has always shown impeccable abilities in any kind of role, willing to rise to any challenge and find the truth, regardless of the material. Sophisticated but brimming with fascinating characteristics that play on many of the actor’s own traits, Victim gives Bogarde one of his most insightful, complex roles, manifesting in a performance that isn’t supplementary to the film so much as it is deeply responsible for its success.

Victim walks a narrow tightrope between harrowing realism and overwrought social commentary, which can sometimes be a challenge, considering how Dearden seems to struggle to find a clear approach to the story. However, there’s a sophistication in this approach that benefits the film exceptionally well. We believe this is going to be a stuffy drama that looks at interpersonal relationships by foregrounding legal policy and social order – this is absolutely evident in the film, but its the ways in which it balances this side of the material with more cutting-edge storytelling. As mentioned before, this is mostly a crime film, although one can easily argue against such a classification, since the “crime” being investigated is mainly centred on sexuality rather than anything profoundly harmful. The film does manage to employ a kind of authenticity by centring the story on a blackmail plot (thus allowing it to be primarily a procedural drama in form), but cleverly refuses to be defined as such. Rather, it approaches it by using this more traditional as a means to get the film seen, from which Dearden and his collaborators were able to infuse it with a more resonant message of identity, which gradually takes over the film. By the time we’re fully enveloped by the story, everything else is inconsequential – the identity of the blackmailer is revealed quite early on and hardly even registers as anything particularly interesting (even if Derren Nesbitt is fully-committed to playing such a vile character), but rather just as an essential plot point in a film more concerned with more compelling matters.

Far from the definitive film focusing on sexuality, but rather a pioneering one that helped these stories enter the mainstream and incited many future films to cover this period (Bogarde himself starred in The Servant a few years later, which may have been far less explicit in its discussion of homosexuality in Great Britain at the time, but still managed to explore it through other means), Victim is a tremendously fascinating film that takes on some intimidating subject matter – and gladly dealt with the consequences as a result – for the sake of telling an important story. It doesn’t always manage to be as profound as it wants to be, and seems to be too safe at some points, but still finds the humanity in a story that could’ve so easily veered towards bland and lifeless at one extreme, and horrifyingly exploitative and gauche on the other. What we get is a compelling story of a man dealing with his own identity in the face of very real ramifications, fighting for his own survival while refusing to blame himself for his desires, acknowledging that he is not a deviant, but rather a representative of a side of humanity consistently reviled for something they cannot change. Anchored by a tremendous performance from Dirk Bogarde, and directed with simplicity but admirable precision by Basil Dearden, Victim is a very successful film in a number of ways, and what it lacks in originality it more than makes up for in intention and its own conviction, which means so much more than anything else a film like this could do with this material.