A liberal film on the subject of homosexuality rather than the radical film some considered it at the time, Victim still stands as an intelligent film attempting to address an important social issue.
Victim
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
United Kingdom · 1961
1h 40m
Director Basil Dearden
Starring Dirk Bogarde, Sylvia Syms, Dennis Price, Anthony Nicholls
Genre Crime, Drama, Thriller
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Melville is a closeted lawyer living in 1960s London when his idyllic existence is interrupted by a blackmailer threatening to reveal his secret. But he refuses to give in, instead risking it all to bring the culprit to justice in this drama that had the British Board of Film Censors seething.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
The New York Times by Bosley Crowther
As a straight piece of blackmail melodrama, it is a good bit below the British par. But as a frank and deliberate exposition of the well-known presence and plight of the tacit homosexual in modern society it is certainly unprecedented and intellectually bold.
Victim, for all its compromises, offers a rich mosaic of minor characters, none of them particularly complex but each articulating some British attitude toward homosexuality and the law surrounding it.
The New Yorker by Pauline Kael
Ingenious, moralistic, and moderately amusing.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
This gripping thriller, part of the BFI's Bogarde retrospective, daringly smashed through 1961's homosexual taboos, but has weathered best as a study of blackmail and paranoia.
The movie proceeds on two levels, as a crime thriller and as a character study, and it's this dual nature that makes it an entertainment at the same time it works as a message picture.
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