Film Review – July 1994

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Call Sheet

Victim

Film Review talk to Sir Dirk Bogarde, Sylvia Syms, Michael Relph and Norman Bird about the controversial movie.

THE TABLOIDS must have welcomed Victim. Dirk Bogarde, Britain’s number one film idol, broke away from his customary heroic image to play a tortured homosexual! ‘It is the biggest slap in the eye Dirk Bogarde has dealt his more emotional female fans since the day he objected to a girls’ school next door to his house in Buckinghamshire,’ screeched the Daily Express on 30th August 1961.

Sir Dirk Bogarde, however, recalls that none of these ’emotional fans’ were at all distressed by Victim. “They didn’t understand it,” he tells Film Review. “I was number one for about ten years, and only audience ranged fron1 ten to shteen. They didn’ t go [and see it]. There was a more discriminatory audience of people who wanted to see better films.”

Victim told the story of Melville Farr (Bogarde), happily married to Laura (Sylvia Syms), whose life is wrecked when a young builder called Boy Barrett takes his own life. Barrett was a homosexual, and was being blackmailed over an intimate photograph of himself and Farr. In an era when homosexual men were sent to prison, Farr decides to risk his career and marriage to foil the blackmailers. The message of the film is clear: a law that sends homosexuals to prison is a blackmailer’s charter.

Today, it is difficult to appreciate quite how daring Victim was; a taboo social issue wrapped within the framework of a thriller. Producer Michael Relph, director Basil Dearden and writers Janet Green and John McCormick had previously attempted the same formula with Sapphire, which commented on the race issue.

“We thought this was a good way of putting over a story about something important,” says Michael Relph. “[After Sapphire] we looked at what other subjects we could treat in a similar sort of way. At this particular time there was a lot of discussion about the legalizing of homosexuality and we decided that it was something that was right for treatment.” Victim‘s mix of thrills and message was widely condemned; one critic wrote that ‘there is too much argument and too little visual action’. At the time, the late Basil Dearden responded “If we hadn’t wrapped it up in a blackmail thriller, it would have become simply a tract. And you can’t spend £170,000 on filming a tract.” Sir Dirk Bogarde believes that this kind of cinema was very effective. “You have to remember that at that time there was no television,’ he explains, “and people still went to the cinema. Audiences queued in the rain to see you, so they didn’t want the pill to have all the spikes on it, they wanted some comfort. It was an easy way of getting people to understand that cinema could do something as well as make them laugh.

‘If you’ve read anything I’ve ever written, all I’ve ever wanted to do was disturb, illuminate and amuse, but also instruct. All Basil and Michael Relph’s films attempted to do that.” Victim began life as a script called ‘Boy Barrett’. “We didn’ t like that title particularly,” says Michael Relph, of the decision for the change.

Selecting the actor to play the respected barrister Melville Farr presented intense problems. Dirk Bogarde, who at the time was under contract to Rank Films, recalls a panic telephone call on Christmas Eve, 1960. “Basil Dearden was an old friend of mine, and lived not very far away from my house in Buckinghamshire. He called up in despair while I was decorating the Christmas tree. He simply said, ‘I’m in a terrible jam. We’ve got a script going in the middle of January and the leading actor has turned the part down. Will you take it on? Can I bike it over?’

“He biked it over on Christmas Eve, and I read it, and I did it. I was not first choice, the actor who was first choice said that if he played the part it would prejudice his chances of a Knighthood.”

Sir Dirk Bogarde, however, saw the opportunity to play an interesting role following three films that he wanted to forget. “I made a film in Italy called The Angel Wore Red, with Ava Gardner and Joseph Cotton. It all looked real, we were doing it for Cinéma vérité, but Metro couldn’t come to terms with that, so that was a failure. Then I did Libel with Anthony Asquith and Olivia de Havilland, which I thought was a bit of a fuck up, but everybody else seemed to think it was all right. Then I did the famous Liszt Song Without End, and I thought, ‘If I go on like this, I’m down the plug hole’. I was by that time forty, and it seemed wise to take a risk.”

“We were rather surprised that Dirk agreed to do it,” comments Michael Relph. “Although we knew him very well and he’d done other films with us, it was very doubtful whether he would feel in his position as a Rank romantic star that he would want to play that sort of part. We were very delighted when he did.”

Norman Bird played only one scene with Dirk Bogarde, but has vivid memories of the day’s filming because the script had been rewritten on the previous evening. “We came to run it through,” he says, “and the first take I dried in the middle of it and apologized to him. I said it was because I’d got the script three or four weeks before and learned the scene, and I’d got that in my head and then got a new script. With his experience, Dirk said, ‘Oh I never learn my scripts until the night before I do it’. I don’t think I’ve ever done that -he’s obviously got a very quick brain.”

Sir Dirk Bogarde was not convinced by the casting of a young Peter McEnery as Boy Barrett. “I seem to remember saying to Basil, ‘I don’t think Melville Parr would have gone for this boy, he’s a sort of wimp’. I didn’ t think that homosexual men cared for that kind of thing. He was specifically a builder on a building site, so that in my mind was a burly youth with broad shoulders and with a bit more masculinity.”

Had Sir Dirk done any research into the work of a barrister for the part? “I had no need to,” he laughs. “I had nothing to do. You were only told he was a barrister, you never saw him [at work].”

Victim commenced shooting on Tuesday 7th February 1961 at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire and on locations across Central London. The filming was scheduled to last ten weeks, over what Sir Dirk Bogarde recalls as, “The whole of a very cold winter. “We were all overcome when we were summoned on the first day of shooting,” he continues, “and told that under no circumstances were we to use the words homosexual, faggot, puff, nancy, queer, queen….on it went for a whole litany – anything. I said, ‘We’re about to make a bloody movie! I’m taking the lead in this, what the hell do we call these people we’re playing?’ Someone – I can’t remember who it was-said, ‘We’re going to use the word ‘invert’.’ We just went ashen!

“We made the film for the first four or five days with as much reverence as making The Raising of Lazarus. Until one day a carpenter got fed up with the whole business, he was walking over the set and one of his mates was in the corner bending down, and he shouted ‘Charlie, watch your arse!’ That broke the mood, and everybody fell apart laughing. After ‘watch your arse’ we were all a group, and it was a very irreverent film. I had more fun than I ever had on the Doctors.” As the location work was to be shot in the heart of London’s tourist areas, the production team organized their schedule to avoid attracting crowds. “We used to shoot at very bad times so the public weren’t around,” says Bogarde. “It’s very difficult to shoot in London, they’re not eager to have you on the streets, so we had to shoot between two and five in the morning for night shots, and that meant that people had gone to bed.”

“The (Farrs’] house was in Hammersmith by the Embankment,” says Michael Relph. “We shot some scenes by the Doves public house, and I remember we used the Salisbury pub in St Martins Lane, which was a well known haunt of homosexuals.”

Victim opened at the Odeon Leicester Square in September 1961. It was awarded an X Certificate. “At that time the subject matter justified that,” says Michael Relph. “It just meant it was barred to underage people.” Critical praise was noticeably forthcoming; The Guardian approved of ‘its quick, sure delineation of character, its deft dialogue and its sensible, matter-of-fact harmonisation of story and realistic setting’. The paper’s only negative criticism was of the character of Laura; ‘representing outraged convention, loyal wife, and stark, culpable stupidity- all in a single person.’ To some extent Sylvia Syms can agree with this evaluation. “I didn’t think the wife’s part was very well developed.”

However, she stands by Laura’s naïvete. “It’s difficult for people to believe now, but my generation weren’t very knowledgable about sex. We didn’t sleep with people before we were married, we were very much more innocent. Janet Green was a writer that I admired; she said that the woman hoped he would change when he was married. We were very naive; we thought people could be made better.”

Despite the concerns about the subject matter, the film did make money. Michael Relph: “It was a huge hit in the city centres, but when it got out in the sticks it wasn’t a success because people really didn’t understand what it was about.” In America, however, the censors were having none of it. Victim was judged ‘thematically objectionable’, and certain cuts were demanded before it would be granted a seal.

Similar problems arose while attempting to cast Farr’s wife, Laura. “One actress who was very famous at the time, but is now dead, said that she was ‘out of sympathy with the theme’,” says Sir Dirk Bogarde.

“The only person who accepted- thank God-was dear Sylvia Syms who was splendid and said ‘I don’t know what the problem is?’ Sylvia was absolutely valiant, and played it to the hilt, and I shall never cease to be grateful to her.”

“I wanted to work with Dirk,” explains Sylvia Syms of her reason for doing the film. “I adored working with him; I thought he was a marvellous person.

“You have to realize that for then it was a controversial subject,” she continues. “The only problem was that I was five or six months pregnant, although I look lovely and slim in the film. We had to shoot all my scenes in a couple of weeks and then I went into hospital; I was rather ill. I hadn’t been looking for work, but they asked me to do it and I said yes straight away; I thought it was an important subject.

“I was already very aware of the situation; I hated people going to prison, it was dreadful in those days. I was political in the wider sense of the word. “My sadness was that because of the baby I didn’t do The Servant; I was going to do the Wendy Craig part. That was all set up, but it was a bit difficult. I was good at lots of things, but not having babies!” Michael Relph was delighted with the leading lady. “She was always well known as a good actress,” he affirms. “She was very pretty, and we felt that she was right for it.”

The actress explains that she received no negative feedback for having taken the controversial role. “My friends would have approved of me doing it, and I didn’t really care what other people thought. I was just glad we did it. I realized sometimes that people might come and visit the set and look very disapproving and say that Dirk will ruin his career. That was all rubbish; it made him a new career, he became the wonderful character actor we know him as now.”

Indeed, Sir Dirk Bogarde came out of Victim very well. The Sunday Express noted that the film was, ‘A big risk for Bogarde-but he brings it off’. Did Sir Dirk have any significant concerns about playing the part?

“I had said I would do it, but on the condition that we did it properly and the man was queer”

“No, not at all,” he states. “It was a very dull part. Originally it was a very straightforward, very well written thriller in an ordinary way, with no denouement. Janet Green had done a splendid job on it, and I’d worked with her before on Cast A Dark Shadow. It was a whodunnit, but the homosexuality was done so discretely it was covered in bloody lace.

“I had said I would do it, but on the condition that we did it properly and the man was queer, and had to be seen as such. The film ended originally with him going to court with his loyal wife and his lawyer with this unknown problem, facing up to his blackmailer and the housekeeper who is very sweet and dear hovering about wishing him good luck. They all went off to court, and that was the end of the picture.

“I said that wouldn’t do- what we had to have was a confrontation between the wife and the husband, where he does say that he loved the boy. They all looked up in horror and fainted away, except for Basil Dearden who was a really tough director and a very good one. Basil, and to some extent Michael Relph, agreed with me. I wrote the scene, they were rather worried about it, the lawyers weren’t very happy, but then they thought ‘it’s no skin off our noses, if you want to say you’re playing a homosexual, OK, fine’.”

“It was something we welcomed,” Michael Relph comments on Dirk Bogarde’s involvement in the script. “It was good for an actor to feel at home with what he had to say.”

“We tried to make it simpler and more honest,” Sylvia Syms continues. “I think Dirk was fairly powerful about what he wanted to do.”

The two lead stars were supported by a number of trusted British character actors, including Dennis Price, Donald Churchill, Nigel Stock and Norman Bird.

Bird was cast as book store owner Harold Doe, whose affection for Boy Barrett leads him to blame Melville Farr for his death. “I’d met Basil Dearden about eighteen months earlier; he was doing a film called The League of Gentlemen,” says Norman Bird about the circumstances of his being cast. Dearden had employed Bird again on the Kenneth Moore-starrer Man in the Moon, but was only able to offer the actor a relatively small role in Victim. Nevertheless, Norman Bird was delighted to appear in the film.

“It’s quite a juicy sort of cameo role, which only took two days to shoot,” he says. “I had to get it in pretty quickly because in those days I used to do quite a few films, and I went off to do Whistle Down the Wind the day after.”

“It was a change from those insipid leading men that I was very good at playing”

“We certainly didn’t think the film should be cut in any way,” says Michael Relph. “We believed in it as it was. If it was something fairly superficial we would have considered it.”

Uncut, without a seal, Victim was shown in the art cinemas in the States, and failed to attract a majority audience. How did the film’s leading man feel about this?

“I’ve never actually taken any notice of the Americans in my life,” says Sir Dirk Bogarde, who did not enjoy his experiences of Hollywood at all. “After that Liszt film I thought, ‘Never again in my life’. Efficiency beyond belief, and very exciting, but the stuff you had to be efficient about was dross in the main. I’m not talking about The Grapes of Wrath or Gone with the Wind; I’m talking about the average mainstream picture. Now it’s very different, you’ve got people like Spielberg making films out of Hollywood, and people have broken that hideous stranglehold of the rich conglomerates. They controlled the cinema, and it was just madness what they did.”

For Bogarde, however, the film was seen at the time as the role of his career, and he went on to star in many acclaimed movies including Death in Venice, Accident, The Night Porter and Providence. “It was a change from all those nice little Dr Sparrows and all those insipid leading men that I was very good at playing,” he says. “Afterwards I really didn’t do much more of that kind of thing.”

The actor believes that this was a natural progression; his teenage audience began to wane, but young women were by then making idols of pop stars. “The Beatles were slowly steaming up, and Elvis was on the prowl, and a whole new beat generation was coming in, and the children were turning their backs on those cosy Ealing pictures and funny Carry Ons. They didn’t want us. After all I was forty, and once I put white paint in my hair because I’ve never gone grey- to make me look old enough to be a lawyer, that upset a lot of the girl fans. They were more used to seeing me in riding breeches or leather.”

Victim made its mark not only on Bogarde’s career, but also the public. “People wrote frantically after it,” says the leading man. “Terribly sad letters, saying ‘Oh God, now we know what was wrong with Tom or Dick or Harry or my Father or my Husband’ from people who didn’t know that this thing existed.

“We sort of cleared the air, and I think it was the beginning. Michael Relph and Basil Dearden were always trying to do something innovative, and they really succeeded. If they’d been allowed to go on we might have had a decent British cinema.” In 1967, the law was changed, and homosexuality was legalized. Is it naive to think that one film could actually have contributed to this mammoth social change in Britain?

“It drew a lot of attention to it at a time when there wasn’t a lot of movement towards legalisation,” notes Michael Relph. “The Wolfenden report had just come out, and so it was quite a topical subject, but undoubtedly the film brought it home to people and it was an important element in getting the law improved.”

Sir Dirk Bogarde is adamant that the film helped change the law. “I know it did,” he says. “I have a letter from Lord Aron, who fought for the consenting age between adults. He had a terrible battle, and he saw Victim and he wrote me a very charming letter to say that they’d won this vote, due to himself and in a large measure to our work in Victim, which had helped to sway the vote.

“I thought it was extremely kind of him to write to me, and I treasure that letter because it was the first proof that something I had done had made sense to a minority group. I will do anything I can for a minority group. I’m not a Vanessa Redgrave, and I’m not one of those luvvies who rush round and sign a letter at the drop of a hat, but I do passionately care about sticking my neck out if it’s something I think is important. Clearly from the mail I received Victim was a landmark film for a lot of British people.”

Thirty years later Tom Hanks wins an Academy Award for his portrayal of a gay attorney dying of AIDS in Philadelphia. The film is the first major Hollywood movie to deal with AIDS; it is seen by many as a groundbreaking picture.

“When I was reading about Philadelphia I thought, ‘That’s interesting’,” says Sylvia Syms. “Move on a few years and that is Dirk’s character. He wasn’t dying of AIDS, but he was about to lose everything. At the end of the film, when he decided to come out and beat the blackmailers, he would have lost his chambers, and whether his wife would have gone back I really don’t know.

“It was very brave.”