VALERIE GROVE
It was not a great film, but it was an important film. Victim [1961], about a married homosexual barrister blackmailed by a young man, really did break new ground.
I remember being horrified and a bit mystified, at 15, seeing the barrister’s garage door spray-painted with the word ‘QUEER’. During filming, Basil Dearden, the director, forbade any mention on set of queers, poofs or nancy boys. The word they should use, he said, was the dictionary definition: ‘inverts’.
Well, it is 50 years since the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, and the BBC’S Gay Britannia season included an excellent Radio 3 play by Sarah Wooley about how Victim, a gamble for everyone concerned, got made.
Several actors turned down the lead role: to play a gay man was regarded as professional suicide. But Dirk Bogarde, at almost 40, happened to be in a career doldrum: Doctor in the House had morphed him into a Rank matinée idol, who despised both the movies he made and his adoring audiences. Bogarde (Ed Stoppard in this play) tells Tony Forwood, his long-term partner, why he must take this part: otherwise, some macho actor would put on a camp performance and ruin it.
But the film industry was terrified, and no American distributor would take it; there was relief when the censor John
Trevelyan finally gave it a classification (X) at all. The film critic Alexander Walker, Bogarde-like in his discretion about his own personal life, appears in this play, giving Victim a glowing review, despite his paper being owned by Beaverbrook, ‘who forbids any mention of homosexuality in his newspapers’. Nobody could have predicted that
Victim would be the making of Bogarde as an actor, but it was. Soon after came the call from Joe Losey, offering Pinter’s script for The Servant. Victim, The Servant, Death in Venice: these were Bogarde’s best films. Sarah Wooley’s play is obliged to spell out in simple words (for the non-oldie audience) what Dearden, with his partner Michael Relph and the screenwriter Janet Green (Fenella Woolgar), were up against in 1961.
By bringing in parliamentary voices, Wooley places Victim in its postWolfenden context: Cyril Osborne against, Roy Jenkins pro, and Lord ‘Boofy’ Arran, championing his ‘buggers’ bill’ in the House of Lords, hoping that the beneficiaries – ‘who will remain objects of dislike, derision and pity’ – will show dignity and not ‘flaunt themselves’.
About such a laudably enlightening play, for which intensive research has plainly been done, it may seem pernickety to point out anachronisms. But ‘Don’t get me started’ or ‘any time soon’ were not, trust me, 1960 locutions. Why not ask an oldie?
Woody Allen’s famous self-deprecation was on show in the Today arts slot, talking of playing his clarinet with his New Orleans jazz band at the Albert Hall.
‘It’s ironic that a musician of my awful dreadfulness could be appearing at the Albert Hall,’ he said. ‘It’s just a hobby, like if I had sailboats or liked to build bridges from toothpicks. I’m a completely untalented amateur.’
Well, some friends got tickets; so I was there. Earlier that week, I’d missed seeing the Oldie’s good friend Wally Fawkes with his All-stars (Wally, at 93, is recuperating from an op); so I hoped Woody, at only 82, might serve as a replacement.
Sadly, Woody is no Wally, who achieves sublime Sydney Bechet heights. Woody’s modesty is more than justified. His tootling sounds like a kazoo. But hey, it was Woody Allen.
He told the indulgent audience he was once a Goon Show fan, and remembered Harry Secombe’s sketch on the theft of the Albert Hall. The other guys in his band were rather good; the songs were old trad favourites like ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’. At the end, Woody said, ‘I’m going home to practise.’