Victim

A good movie or an important movie?

The 4th of July truly feels like the longest day in the world to me. I dread swimming through humid air, the scattered thunderstorms, and the general anxiety that accompanies the day where you’re supposed to be doing so much but want to be doing so little.

Rather than bask in all that is good about this country, I set my sights on the motherland and rewatched Basil Dearden’s Victim, a 1961 neo-noir that is — even without a political agenda baked in its core — a very successful thriller.

The context for Victim is important. Homosexuality was banned in England until the late 1960s, and Dearden’s movie, which starred one of England’s most popular actors, Dirk Bogarde, was the first of such a scale to lend sympathy towards gay men. And it doesn’t even do it discreetly or with unsubtle allusions, as the American films would to avoid the sensors. The gay problem is addressed with such a straightforwardness that even over half a century later it’s difficult not to grasp what a dangerous movie this must have been to make.

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Victim chronicles another rising problem in England at the time, a separate crime the accompanied the laws that banned homosexual activity. With gays facing an omnipresent fear of arrest, there rose a group of people who wanted to capitalize on that anxiety. An officer explains it best early on, in our first real exposition after a series of expertly disorienting sequences that sees a paranoid young man running away from a phantom enemy. Blackmailers are all the rage, and we gather that our boy on the run is only one of a series of gay men who are being held emotionally and financially captive. So questions begins to form in the officer’s mind as he’s forced to abandon a narrow-minded idea of perp vs victim (hard for cops)!

Enter Dirk Bogarde, who plays a respected barrister whose name comes up when the young boy, finally caught, is found with a folder containing photos and news clippings of Bogarde. Before the young man is interrogated any further — and it’s important to remember the sad irony of corroboration for gay men at the time, who must expose themselves to seek justice — he commits suicide.

Bogarde learns of the young man’s death, and wracked with guilt for not helping the young man, who he was in love with, he prepares to put his career and marriage in jeopardy by tracking down the blackmailers. And this is Victim, a slippery noir with no winners or justice, but a truthful account of those content to get rich on gay fear, and the bureaucracies that made it possible along the way.

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Victim was well received by critics when it came out, and it continues to be seen as a landmark film for representation, but with that I’ve noticed some prickly asides about it. Some reviewers of the time, after lauding its cast and Dearden’s decision to take on the project, ultimately come to the conclusion that Victim may fall more into the category of “important film” rather than “good film.”

This is a distinction I’ve been fascinated with for a while, considering that so many of our current movie slate is geared towards prostheslythizing. Movies and content about our cultural moment — a phrase that fills my throat with thick obtrusive bile — are all the rage, and sometimes being on the right side of weighty topical issues excuses a film from its mediocrity. It may be successful at evangelizing, if that’s the agenda, but as someone who turns out and reluctantly pays $18 for a theater ticket, good-naturedness is not enough. We should still want to be left with a good fucking film.

(Because I live my life as a screenwriter, I’m not going to list the movies I believe are trash and pander. The attitude I’ve adopted over the last few years is: it’s so damn difficult to get anything made, and once you’ve tried, once you’ve been part of the process, it should humble you enough to shut the fuck up about what other people are doing publicly).

ANYWAY, Victim, its agenda aside, is a great movie. There are heavy-handed moments where Bogarde essentially argues his unfolding case to the audience, but in general it is subtle, cleverly written, and has a plot that unfurls slowly and satisfyingly. It’s shot in a menacing black and white, and one can feel the claustrophobia it’s cast of gays feel as they — from all different classes and experiences — struggle with how to move through the world without revealing themselves. It’s rarely sensational, and there are some surprises so genuine — particularly with Bogarde’s wife (played by Sylvia Syms) — that I found myself moved by its turns and choices and utter empathy.

With all that, what I love most about Victim is how simply it falls into the noir genre, how its politics unfold through craft and not on-the-nose preaching. It should always be this way . If you want to say something important, make something important, then you should take a beat, reframe, and aim for making a real, thoughtful movie first. If you do that, your agenda will shine through.

Victim is available to stream on the Criterion Channel.