the blackmailer’s charter
Janet
Green and John McCormick (screenplay), Basil Dearden (director) Victim /
1961
Through
a half-intentional coincidence I spent the weekend of international LGBTQ pride
marches watching Basil Dearden’s 1961 film Victim, one of the first
English-language films to actually deal with homosexuality head on. Yes, The
Children’s Hour—based on Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play—was released in the
very same year as Dearden’s, a film hinting, winking, and nodding to a possible
lesbian relationship. A couple of years before Tennessee William’s Suddenly,
Last Summer played with gay child abuse and cannibalism. And in the
following year, the US film Advise and Consent lamely dealt with some of
the same issues. As I have shown, moreover, there have many dozens of smaller
and larger films that hover around the issues, some of them rather joyfully
embracing their would-be/maybe gay and lesbian figures.
The film begins not with the central
character, barrister Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde)—the character’s name alone
calling up the gay American author and a sense of his distance from the society
in which the barrister is now safely entrenched—but with a much younger working
man, Jack “Boy” Barrett (Peter EcEnery), who upon seeing the police arrive at a
construction site in which he is working, bolts, calling a friend to
immediately remove a package from the back of his closet. That package
evidently contains a scrapbook with articles and pictures not only of Farr, but
several other respectable businessmen, a barber, a bookseller, a noted actor and
others, with whom he has consorted over the years.
If “consorted” seems a very archaic
word-choice, it’s perfect here, for the picture with Farr shows them simply in
a car, the lawyer’s hand around Boy, who is in tears (a photo, incidentally,
that we never actually see, despite testimony of several reviewers that do see
it). Evidently the husband and wife writers of this film want us to believe
that Farr himself, once a gay man whose university lover (again in a
non-special relationship) committed suicide, has since lived in a solid
heterosexual relationship with his beloved wife, Laura
(Sylvia
Syms) without sexually going astray.
Obviously, even a third-grader could read
the authorial lie. As Farr later tells his wife, he feared in his “friendship”
with Boy that he was almost ready to go “too far” and “wanted him.”
Accordingly, when Boy calls him several times, attempting to warn Farr of the
police raid, he becomes convinced that his young “would-be” love is himself
trying to blackmail him and refuses to answer. We can presume that something
similar must have happened with his early male lover. For now Farr is highly
successful barrister, possibly about to be appointed as the Queen’s Counsel.
Boy attempts to escape to the nearby
countryside, only to again encounter the police and be arrested. Even though
the police chief attempts to explain that he should explain his activities so
that they might find the blackmailer—Boy has stolen £2,300 from his current
employer—the young man keeps silent, as do most of the figures of this
ultimately tragic work of suspense. The barber, also faced with blackmail sells
his business in order to move away, but when approached by mobsters suffers a
heart-attack and dies. So Boy, like so many gay men of the day, feels trapped.
Sooner or later, he recognizes, the police will shake the truth out of him, and
not only might he be imprisoned but many of his previous companions will be
taken down as well. He, like Farr’s early lover, hangs himself.
The film might timidly have moved on from
here in the manner of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited or as the
early lover of the title character of E. M. Forester’s Maurice did,
enwrapping its characters into hidden married existences. Farr might have faded
back into his closeted life, protecting his career and the domestic placidity
of his home life. But it is precisely here that Dearden’s film grows brave, as
Farr determines to track down the blackmailers on his own, involving one of
Boy’s friends (apparently a heterosexual), as he follows down every clue.
Meanwhile, his wife realizes that the
call she has intercepted from Boy Barrett to her husband is the same figure
which the newspapers have now reported as being dead. She confronts her husband
who quite honestly explains the situation (a scene, apparently,
written
by Bogarde himself), of which she is not convinced, determining that he has
gone back on his commitment to a heterosexual life. Despite the fact that he
now recognizes he may lose her and all public standing, he nonetheless moves
forward, eventually with some police help revealing the blackmailers: I’ll save
those details from future viewers, despite my usual propensity to reveal all
the plot. It really doesn’t matter, since in those days, apparently, there were
hundreds of such figures lurking behind homosexuals, looking for a way to bring
in income. And, yes, the word homosexual is actually used in this film. And
scrawled across Farr’s garage door is an ugly reminder of the times: FARR IS
QUEER.
Who cares, really, if Farr, encouraging
his wife to leave so that she will not be involved with what will surely be an
ugly court case, is later reunited with her. He, unlike so many before him, has
been honest, admitted a love that was not supposed to have been named. And
despite this film’s timidity, in hindsight it proves to be quite brave, facing
a storm of protest the British and US censors at the time—as well as homophobic
critics.
For once, I totally agree with Pauline
Kael’s comments:
The
hero of the film is a man who has never given way to his homosexual impulses;
he has fought them–that's part of his heroism. Maybe that's why he seems such a
stuffy stock figure of a hero... The dreadful irony involved is that Dirk
Bogarde looks so pained, so anguished from the self-sacrifice of repressing his
homosexuality that the film seems to give rather a black eye to heterosexual
life.
After several actors (including James
Mason and Stewart Granger) turned down the role, Bogarde, who was living with
his business manager Anthony Forwood, suggests he may have made one the “wisest”
decisions of his life, allowing him to abandon the pretty boys of the matinee
idol and comic roles to which he had previously been assigned. He went on to
play in Pinter and De Sica films as a conflicted, often gay-oriented figure which
demonstrated his true acting abilities.
Los
Angeles, July 1, 2019
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (July 2019).
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