Victim (1961) on Netflix
NR19611h 40m
Melville Farr is a London barrister in line for a judgeship. A call from Jack Barrett, a young construction worker he once knew, sounds like blackmail. Barrett is the one being blackmailed.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb7.7/108,257 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Melville Farr is a successful London barrister with a thriving practice, a wife named Laura, and a path toward a judgeship and a Queen's Counsel appointment. Before their marriage he had told Laura about his attraction to other men. Jack Barrett, a young construction worker he had once been close to, telephones him for help. Farr, assuming the call is an attempt to blackmail him about their past, tells Barrett not to call again. Barrett has been paying blackmailers who hold a compromising photograph of the two of them together in a car, and he steals £2,300 from his employers to keep up the payments. He has also borrowed £20 from a friend in the hope of leaving the country, and the police are already after him for the theft.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Victim (1961)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Before Dirk Bogarde was cast as the barrister Melville Farr, several actors had already turned down the role, among them Jack Hawkins, James Mason and Stewart Granger, whom producer Michael Relph and director Basil Dearden had approached first.
- Dirk Bogarde reportedly wrote the scene in which his character, the barrister Farr, admits to his wife that he is gay and has continued to be attracted to other men, despite the assurances he had given her.
- Sylvia Syms, who played Farr's wife Laura, later recalled that filming on Victim had to be completed in just 10 days.
- Sylvia Syms readily accepted the part of Laura after several actresses had turned it down; the critic Mark Kermode said her reasons included earlier theater work with John Gielgud, which had shown her the laws against homosexuality, and a family friend who had killed himself after being accused of being gay.
- In the United States, the industry's self-censorship board, the Motion Picture Association of America's Production Code Administration, denied Victim its seal of approval; a spokesperson cited its candid discussion of homosexuality and its pleas for the social acceptance of gay people.
- Controversial scenes were cut before release in discussions with the British Board of Film Censors, including scenes with teenagers, but the board still gave Victim an X rating, a classification then usually reserved for erotica and horror films.
- Dirk Bogarde called Victim his 34th film and his first independent project, and said in 1965 that at Rank the fixed rule had been that he must look pretty, something he said the film ended.
- The 1961 British film Victim was the first British film to explicitly name homosexuality and to deal with it sympathetically.
