80
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.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
70
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.
75
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.
70
The New Yorker by Pauline Kael
Ingenious, moralistic, and moderately amusing.
100
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.
100
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.