A taut little thriller, with a bit more

Last night, Radio 3 repeated Sarah Wooley's dramatisation of the making of Victim. As the BBC blurb says, this was the first British film to address homosexuality seriously. Released in the UK (the makers apparently had resigned themselves to the more conservative US distributors not taking it) in 1961, the film starred matinee idol Dirk Bogarde. In the gamble of his career, he played a married barrister whose career was on the rise but under threat because a blackmail ring had obtained photographs of an embrace with a younger man. The opening sequence of Victim, following the desperate flight from the police of Barrett, the young man in question, grabs the attention and it is a tribute to the writing that the tension rarely lets up. Barrister Farr takes the brave decision to take on the blackmailers, aided by fellow-victims whom Farr persuades to act in solidarity. The film is often credited with helping to change public attitudes to homosexuality.

Hammering home the latter point is the only big flaw in Wooley's treatment in my opinion. The scenes in Parliament recreating key stages in the passage of reforming legislation, tacked on at the end, distracted from the personal dramas of the makers of the film and could have been summarised in a couple of sentences of narrative.

A minor quibble is that the difficulty of casting was not completely addressed. Although the initial feature of the drama was Bogarde's motivation in taking the lead part, after every major actor in his age range and above had shied away from it, there was no explanation of how the important supporting roles were filled, especially those of the fellow victims. There must have been as much resistance among the cadre of British character actors to being associated with a "queer" movie as among the stars. A few may have feared that "lavender marriages" would have come under closer attention from the press. One assumes that a major star like Bogarde coming on board the project may have made casting easier, but it would have been satisfying to know whether this was the case. For instance, would Dennis Price, the star of Kind Hearts and Coronets and leading support in the hit Alan Hackney adaptations, have risked his sexuality coming under question, if a star name had not already been attached to the project?

Sarah Wooley clearly had access to the archive of Janet Green, the screenwriter who had already made her mark with The Clouded Yellow and provided a hit for producer Michael Relph and director Basil Dearden with Sapphire. The radio play showed Ms Green as a strong-minded woman driven to address social problems in her work (Sapphire had centred on colour prejudice) whereas Relph and Dearden were more cautious.

Victim still stands up well as a thriller; indeed, as UK society appears to be growing more homophobic along with its other atavistic tendencies, its message has become relevant again. If you have not seen it yet, I would urge you to catch it when it next comes up on TV.