The film that paved the way for gay rights
As ‘Victim’ returns to cinemas 56 years after its release, Tim Robey looks at its makers’ battle to get it past the censors
The turn of the Sixties was a time when British cinema revolutionised its attitude: it decided to face up to the issues of the day. Few problems were more controversial in public opinion than the legal status of homosexuality. The producer Michael Relph and director Basil Dearden wanted to make a picture on the subject – tellingly called Victim
– that would highlight the injustices suffered by gay men at the time. They had a fight to get it made. But their film was such a damning indictment of the status quo that it actively contributed to a change in the law.
Four years earlier, the Wolfenden Report had recommended the decriminalisation of gay sex between consenting adults in private, signalling the first legal change since the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885. The government received the report guardedly, afraid it went way ahead of public opinion. Not for another decade would the proposals be adopted in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.
It was in this intervening climate that Relph and Dearden campaigned to make their film, which would focus on the attempts of Melville Farr, a leading barrister, to stand up to blackmailers, sacrificing his own reputation to bring the extortion issue to light. The script, by Janet Green and John Mccormick, drops in the amazing statistic that 90 per cent of blackmail cases in that era involved homosexuality.
Relph and Dearden toyed with casting Jack Hawkins, star of their film The League of Gentlemen, in the Farr role, but he was hesitant, and they instead persuaded the Rank Organisation’s leading matinee idol, Dirk Bogarde; he later called accepting it the wisest decision he ever made. The film would be staunchly in favour of all Wolfenden had recommended, but they had to get past the BBFC first.
In 1959, John Trevelyan, the BBFC’S new secretary, expressed a typical us-and-them view: “In our circles we can talk about homosexuality, but the general public is embarrassed by the subject, so until it becomes a subject that can be mentioned without offence it will be banned.” Since Wolfenden, there had been two films about Oscar Wilde, but these were safely couched in period, and the contemporary approach of Victim, with its curiosity about gay life in modern London, caused much more consternation – as did the treatment of the gay role in another 1961 film, Tony Richardson’s
A Taste of Honey. Though Trevelyan and his team agreed to the production of Victim in theory, they heavily vetted the script. “It is very oppressive […] to be confronted with a world peopled with practically no one but ‘queers’,” wrote one early reader of the synopsis. “Great tact and discretion will be needed if this project is to come off, and the ‘queerness’ must not be laid on with a trowel.” Trevelyan advised against alienating “the great majority of cinemagoers” for whom homosexuality was “shocking, distasteful and disgusting”. Even when the final script was delivered, he had concerns about the balance of sympathies “coming down rather heavily in favour of the homosexuals”.
Given the restrictions, it’s striking how forthright and potent a statement Victim wound up making. The set was closed to all visitors during production and the subject concealed from the press. It leaked out eventually, of course, and the Daily Express set the appalled tone: “Would a star of Dirk Bogarde’s calibre risk his reputation with his fans by playing such a role?” The truth is that Bogarde’s courage in playing Farr – which could have been a career-ender – parallels the crusade of the character himself, who knows that testifying against his blackmailers will mean professional suicide.
“To treat the theme as a thriller may not be particularly bold,” wrote Dilys Powell in her Sunday Times review, “but to treat it at all was brave.” Though Farr’s martyrdom has made him an easy figure for later critics to roll their eyes at, the film takes risks in its unsentimentality and the noirish landscape of fear. When Farr’s ex-lover Jack Barrett (Peter Mcenery), tries to warn him about the threat, Farr mistakes his approaches for extortion and shuts him out, hastening the young man’s suicide.
In America, Victim was deemed too contentious for a Production Code Seal of Approval, ghettoising it to arthouse cinemas. But in Britain, it had enormous impact on release in August
‘Would a star of Dirk Bogarde’s calibre risk his reputation with his fans by playing such a role?’
1961. The wide range of gay characters, crossing class divides, helped to explode stereotypes and broaden acceptance. The legal discussion was re-energised. And for gay men then, the film was a watershed – many had never seen themselves credibly represented on screen. Buying a ticket to see it was an affirming moment in many lives.
It’s now widely agreed that Victim did much to accelerate the passing of the Sexual Offences Act. Lord Arran, who brought the legislation to Parliament, wrote to Bogarde in 1968, commending his courage. It was one of “countless letters of gratitude” Bogarde said he received. “It is extraordinary,” he wrote in 1979, “in this over-permissive age, to believe that this modest film could ever have been considered courageous, daring or dangerous to make. It was, in its time, all three.”