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Do you understand, because I wanted him
Victim (1961) is the film Dirk Bogarde made at the height of his matinée idol stardom, the one he was told would destroy his career. His critics had grounds for their caution. Originally titled Boy Barrett, the British production was a deliberate act of protest against the anti-gay laws of the land, taking its cues from the 1957 Wolfenden report in hopes of something like the Sexual Offences Act 1967; the screenplay by Janet Green and John McCormick is supposed to contain the first use of the word "homosexual" in an English-language film. Direction was handled by Basil Dearden, who had already made several successful social message pictures with producer Michael Relph. It was released with an X certificate from the British Board of Film Censors and the MPAA refused to approve it at all. Its protagonist was a queer man in search of justice for his lover. I had wanted to see it for years, knowing it was historically significant; what I could not tell from its reputation was whether it would still be good. Pleasantly, since I wanted to write about it for Pride, the answer is a potent, noirish yes.
The premise risks well-meaning liberal soap: unable to tolerate any longer the institutional hypocrisy of a society that punishes consenting adults while allowing real crimes to flourish in the blind eyes of the law, a brilliant, closeted barrister chooses to take on the blackmail ring that drove his boyfriend to suicide, knowing all the while that to involve the police and face his tormentors in court will be the ruin of him completely. The execution does not even glance in the direction of martyrdom, tragic or noble or otherwise. Its one non-negotiable position is the evil of homophobia, especially when signed into law and reinforced by a casual, cultural wall of indifference, contempt, and opportunism. Everything else in the script is a many-sided hall of mirrors, a radicalizing psychomachia through the pubs and side streets of London's West End where each encounter reflects back another angle on a man discovering after cool, compartmentalized, devastating decades that the personal is political and has never been anything but. Nothing cleaves along easy lines of identification. I appreciate this nuance tremendously. It is downright refreshing to see a movie call for queer rights without feeling the need to win over its straight viewers with especially forgiving representation; the heterosexual characters in Victim run the spectrum from hateful to supportive, but even the most progressive ones have moments of cluelessness or condescension, small sharp reminders of the uphill battle just to be treated as human. Even more importantly, the film does not make the mistake of arguing that civil rights should be awarded on a basis of good conduct. If you want to feel benevolently toward some deserving unfortunates, you will not find them in the gay characters of Victim. I'm not saying it's like walking into a Mary Renault party, but very few of the men we meet in this story are at their best. Too many of the regulars at the Chequers (the Salisbury, real-life gay clientele and astonishing bronze nymph lamps intact) are being blackmailed with the same blandly typed letters and extortionate demands, spiking the paranoia of a milieu where affairs are already conducted with the coded intensity of espionage; they're compromised, they're frightened; some of them stick up for their friends and some throw their fellows under the bus; so what? None of them deserve to be caught between the law and a hard place. When the script pleads for tolerance, it does so most effectively in the voices of the men themselves, like the speech delivered with bitter, not unconscious dignity by Charles Lloyd Pack's Henry, an aging barber preparing to sell his "gold mine" of a shop in Soho and emigrate to Canada: "I can't help the way I am, but the law says I'm a criminal. I've been to prison four times. I couldn't go through that again, not at my age . . . I've made up my mind to be sensible, as the prison doctor used to say. I don't care how lonely, but sensible." The liberal-minded Detective Inspector Harris (John Barrie) contributes some arguments in favor of decriminalization, but not disinterestedly; he is at odds with his younger, puritanical sergeant (John Cairney), an otherwise good cop who really believes in slippery slopes. You can't always tell the homophobes by their Bible-bashing and their slurs. Sometimes they just look like your friendly local barman, who smiles and collects your tips and hates your bloody guts.
Above all, I appreciate that if Melville Farr (Bogarde) is going to be British cinema's first openly queer hero, he's no cardboard paragon. His drive to expose the blackmailers at the certain cost of his own reputation has as much of self-reckoning in it as it does legal crusading: he used his well-schooled, strategically married, up-and-coming-Queen's-Counsel's privilege as a smokescreen for himself at the expense of the man who loved him, who turned thief to shield him from blackmail and hanged himself in his cell so as not to betray him to the police, and now he is making sure that no part of that privilege will be left to him—never again the straight world's skirts to hide behind. It's a galvanic performance. Bogarde was thirty-nine at the time of filming and looks not necessarily older but more haggard as Mel, elegant and tightly etched, a dark, dry, beautiful man buttoned down to the very limits of his skin; the slightest crack and he is live fire, his own pursuing fury. For decades, Mel has framed his internalized homophobia as heroism: "I may share your instincts, but I've always resisted them." The film knows there's nothing admirable in that. He's been afraid his entire life and he's made other men pay for it, forming friendships tense with emotional and erotic intimacy and then breaking them off as soon as they pass the point of plausible deniability. "That's what cost young Stainer his life." The first time we hear about his relationship with Jack "Boy" Barrett (Peter McEnery), the model-blond wages clerk for the construction firm putting up a building near Mel's chambers, it's a firmly bounded story related to the police with a little embarrassment and some responsibility: the well-respected professional who used to give the occasional lift to a nice working-class young man until he realized he was being cruised and put a stop to it, which is why he didn't take any of the frantic calls placed to his townhouse in Chiswick over the last twenty-four hours. When confronted about the oft-alluded Stainer, he calls the passionate friend of his undergraduate years "a neurotic and an hysteric . . . clever and amusing, but quite unstable and completely possessive," once again drawing the line around himself as the stable, normal, correctly masculine one. The reality in both cases is considerably more entangled, but it is essential to Mel's self-myth that other men just fall in love with him with no encouragement on his part. I keep hearing that's an important element of noir, the femme fatale who irresistibly decoys men to their doom. I am delighted that I have finally found a good example and he's male. As for his marriage, the script treats it as sympathetically as a Rattigan play, in ways I still find sophisticated. Mel loves his wife very deeply; he does not and has never desired her. She knows and does not know it; she married him aware of his feelings for men, but she was nineteen and starstruck and confident he would change. Perhaps he hoped he would. The hothouse culture of Cambridge in the '30's. One of those phases everyone goes through. But after years of trying, it is exquisitely clear that if Mel is bisexual, it is only in the most mechanical sense of the word—asked point-blank by her brother if the marriage has satisfied her, Laura Farr (Sylvia Syms) replies carefully, "He's very kind and understanding." She has a job working with troubled children at a local school, a kind of art therapy. They have no children of their own. "There hasn't been a day," Mel swears to her as they gaze out over the wet glitter of low tide and the chains of Hammersmith Bridge, "that I haven't thanked God for you." Her voice is soft but unyielding, her blonde hair blown in the January wind: "Mel, I'm not a lifebelt for you to cling to. I'm a woman and I want to be loved for myself."
So he has wronged not only the men he wasn't brave enough to love, but the woman he wasn't brave enough not to marry; he has not even done well by himself or he wouldn't look like he's haunting his own life. In 1961, in a movie where the language of homophobia is so pervasive that even gay characters talk of a "magic cure" or hold as a point of pride that they "never corrupted the normal," it stands out a post-Stonewall mile that Mel's real heroism is coming out. Practically, it's the only way to secure a conviction: "Blackmail is the simplest of crimes when we have the cooperation of the victim. Almost impossible when we haven't." Personally, it's the only way he can live. There are a lot of raw moments in this picture, but the most painful for me is the bitter ache in Mel's voice as he answers, slantwise, his wife's question of what he felt for Boy Barrett: "If it was love, why should I want to stamp it out? Why would I do that if it was love?" There is no apology but honesty, the thing he couldn't give the other man when he was alive. "I believe that if I go into court as myself," he explains almost as steadily as if it's some other man who'll be mocked and pilloried, disbarred and maybe jailed, "I can draw attention to the fault in the existing law." Like Turing reporting his burglary, only Mel the lawyer knows what he's getting into. And yet from the moment he's handed the photograph that Boy died to keep away from the authorities, there's nothing else to do. It must have landed in theaters like TNT.
That vote for truth and damn the consequences is still breathtaking; I suspect it is the primary reason that generations of later activism did not leave Victim in the dust. In other areas, I agree the movie hedges its bets. It does not endorse Mel's destructive self-denial, but it's impossible not to think that a queer but chaste hero was undoubtedly more palatable to straight audiences who could accept the theory of Dirk Bogarde wanting to kiss another man more readily than they would watch the actual tonsil hockey. The blackmail material itself is similarly complex and slightly cop-out. We never get a good look at the photo, but we learn eventually from a trustworthy third party that despite its threat it would never have held up as evidence in court: there's nothing really incriminating in it, only two men in a car with their faces close together, one of them crying. To Laura who knows what it's like to look at someone with unfulfilled love and sorrow, the expression on Mel's face tells the whole story, but a stranger might read it merely as distress at another person's pain, the kind of empathy that is permitted occasionally even between straight men. The script backs off repeatedly from confronting its audience with anything too sexual or even too far out of the mainstream. Cottaging? Renting? There's little camp, no Polari, almost nothing even in the way of slang except when a piece of whitewashed graffiti blares from the garage door that "FARR IS QUEER." Being a message picture, it stresses the travails of contemporary gay life rather than the culture and community being produced in spite of them. But it's not wall-to-wall pity-stacking and it is not totally ignorant of the lives that people make for themselves in the margins; I would not recommend it otherwise. I love the late scene where Mel meets Harold Doe (Norman Bird), the mousy bookseller whose painful history with Boy was one of our first clues to the nature of this elliptical half-world, because it plays exactly like the domestic drama that it is—the housewife and the glamorous homewrecker. "How dare you come in my shop?" the smaller man demands, all his proprietor's helpful smoothness dropped; he has the advantage of his slender, sharp-dressed visitor and he doesn't look as though it gives him any pleasure. "Boy Barrett was happy here with me. I'd have taken him into partnership. He'd have had a home here . . . Do you realize what you did?" Mel takes the words like a slap in the face: "I realize everything." It's obvious that it never once occurred to him that he was moving in on a household when he started picking Boy up. Why should it? He lives with his wife; he knows nothing of how men live with one another. Elsewhere we follow the exploits of P.H. and Mickey (Hilton Edwards and David Evans), a middle-aged couple who keep tabs on gossip at the Chequers with the bitchy sang-froid of a chorus and run an obscure sideline in petty crime; they are shady and engaging and we hope they make it back to Cheltenham all right. And right from the start of the picture, although his place in it is initially unclear, we have Donald Churchill's Eddy Stone. He's Boy's flatmate, a tube station ticket clerk who works nights and drinks at the Chequers; he looks like nothing special, a youngish man with a rumpled curl of dark hair, an anxious crescent face and a slight stammer, but he unhesitatingly goes to bat first for Boy and then for Mel and he seems to have skipped the self-hating stage altogether. He's not outspoken about his sexuality, but neither does he show any shame over it, just a reasonable concern about the hazards of amateur detecting. "If you do run them down," he's the first to tell Mel, "you'll bring yourself down as well." I wish the film did not lose track of him at the finale; he deserved to be present at the windup of a mystery he helped solve. I am still not sure if the dark-browed, lion-nosed plainclothes policeman played by John Bennett asks him out for coffee as part of his cover or just because he has good taste.
Dirk Bogarde was not William Haines. He never married to satisfy the Rank Organisation, but he managed his private life as carefully as any studio publicist; he maintained until the end of his life that his decades cohabiting with Anthony Forwood were purely platonic. But in the years after Melville Farr, there was no shortage of queer, weird, sexually controversial roles in his second, not at all destroyed career as a character actor and an arthouse darling—The Servant (1963), Accident (1967), The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), The Night Porter (1974)—and his haunted, determined performance is not the only reason it is impossible to imagine Victim without him: he wrote its most important scene himself. It is the scene in which Mel comes out to his wife. Even that makes it sound tidier than it is; it is a late-night argument that sprawls and tangles in a room as sharply lit and shadowed as anything out of RKO in the days of Anthony Mann, as Laura presses her husband for the truth and it shocks them both when she gets it. "I have a right to know!" she cries and he whirls on her like a stag at bay, a man who has always had his back to a wall, just now you can see it. He speaks quite crisply and quietly and then suddenly he's shouting, shaking with the importance of what he's saying. His words are extraordinary:
"All right. You want to know. I shall tell you. You won't be content until you know, will you? Till you've ripped it out of me. I stopped seeing him because I wanted him. Do you understand, because I wanted him!"
If the rest of the film had been earnest and embarrassing, it would still have been indispensable for these few lines, the unambiguous confession of physical desire by one man for another. Not knew, not loved. Wanted. There is a furious devastation in Mel's face, a desperate transparency of shame and defiance and grief. His wife can't meet his eyes. For a moment his face tightens as if he might cry, but instead he says, quietly again, "Now what good has that done you?" If he's asking the audience, immeasurable. His love smashed the fourth wall. It dared to speak its name.
It's still speaking, in voices that went beyond Bogarde's, beyond the bittersweet ending of Victim and into queerer, more radical, more joyous and angrier stories; I hear it even when my city hasn't just had a Pride parade. I was glad to hear it here, in a film that nearly sixty years and a legal sea-change later still has something to say. So it's not perfect—and it's not—it knows that has nothing to do with being valid, and human, and real. This landmark brought to you by my honest backers at Patreon.
The premise risks well-meaning liberal soap: unable to tolerate any longer the institutional hypocrisy of a society that punishes consenting adults while allowing real crimes to flourish in the blind eyes of the law, a brilliant, closeted barrister chooses to take on the blackmail ring that drove his boyfriend to suicide, knowing all the while that to involve the police and face his tormentors in court will be the ruin of him completely. The execution does not even glance in the direction of martyrdom, tragic or noble or otherwise. Its one non-negotiable position is the evil of homophobia, especially when signed into law and reinforced by a casual, cultural wall of indifference, contempt, and opportunism. Everything else in the script is a many-sided hall of mirrors, a radicalizing psychomachia through the pubs and side streets of London's West End where each encounter reflects back another angle on a man discovering after cool, compartmentalized, devastating decades that the personal is political and has never been anything but. Nothing cleaves along easy lines of identification. I appreciate this nuance tremendously. It is downright refreshing to see a movie call for queer rights without feeling the need to win over its straight viewers with especially forgiving representation; the heterosexual characters in Victim run the spectrum from hateful to supportive, but even the most progressive ones have moments of cluelessness or condescension, small sharp reminders of the uphill battle just to be treated as human. Even more importantly, the film does not make the mistake of arguing that civil rights should be awarded on a basis of good conduct. If you want to feel benevolently toward some deserving unfortunates, you will not find them in the gay characters of Victim. I'm not saying it's like walking into a Mary Renault party, but very few of the men we meet in this story are at their best. Too many of the regulars at the Chequers (the Salisbury, real-life gay clientele and astonishing bronze nymph lamps intact) are being blackmailed with the same blandly typed letters and extortionate demands, spiking the paranoia of a milieu where affairs are already conducted with the coded intensity of espionage; they're compromised, they're frightened; some of them stick up for their friends and some throw their fellows under the bus; so what? None of them deserve to be caught between the law and a hard place. When the script pleads for tolerance, it does so most effectively in the voices of the men themselves, like the speech delivered with bitter, not unconscious dignity by Charles Lloyd Pack's Henry, an aging barber preparing to sell his "gold mine" of a shop in Soho and emigrate to Canada: "I can't help the way I am, but the law says I'm a criminal. I've been to prison four times. I couldn't go through that again, not at my age . . . I've made up my mind to be sensible, as the prison doctor used to say. I don't care how lonely, but sensible." The liberal-minded Detective Inspector Harris (John Barrie) contributes some arguments in favor of decriminalization, but not disinterestedly; he is at odds with his younger, puritanical sergeant (John Cairney), an otherwise good cop who really believes in slippery slopes. You can't always tell the homophobes by their Bible-bashing and their slurs. Sometimes they just look like your friendly local barman, who smiles and collects your tips and hates your bloody guts.
Above all, I appreciate that if Melville Farr (Bogarde) is going to be British cinema's first openly queer hero, he's no cardboard paragon. His drive to expose the blackmailers at the certain cost of his own reputation has as much of self-reckoning in it as it does legal crusading: he used his well-schooled, strategically married, up-and-coming-Queen's-Counsel's privilege as a smokescreen for himself at the expense of the man who loved him, who turned thief to shield him from blackmail and hanged himself in his cell so as not to betray him to the police, and now he is making sure that no part of that privilege will be left to him—never again the straight world's skirts to hide behind. It's a galvanic performance. Bogarde was thirty-nine at the time of filming and looks not necessarily older but more haggard as Mel, elegant and tightly etched, a dark, dry, beautiful man buttoned down to the very limits of his skin; the slightest crack and he is live fire, his own pursuing fury. For decades, Mel has framed his internalized homophobia as heroism: "I may share your instincts, but I've always resisted them." The film knows there's nothing admirable in that. He's been afraid his entire life and he's made other men pay for it, forming friendships tense with emotional and erotic intimacy and then breaking them off as soon as they pass the point of plausible deniability. "That's what cost young Stainer his life." The first time we hear about his relationship with Jack "Boy" Barrett (Peter McEnery), the model-blond wages clerk for the construction firm putting up a building near Mel's chambers, it's a firmly bounded story related to the police with a little embarrassment and some responsibility: the well-respected professional who used to give the occasional lift to a nice working-class young man until he realized he was being cruised and put a stop to it, which is why he didn't take any of the frantic calls placed to his townhouse in Chiswick over the last twenty-four hours. When confronted about the oft-alluded Stainer, he calls the passionate friend of his undergraduate years "a neurotic and an hysteric . . . clever and amusing, but quite unstable and completely possessive," once again drawing the line around himself as the stable, normal, correctly masculine one. The reality in both cases is considerably more entangled, but it is essential to Mel's self-myth that other men just fall in love with him with no encouragement on his part. I keep hearing that's an important element of noir, the femme fatale who irresistibly decoys men to their doom. I am delighted that I have finally found a good example and he's male. As for his marriage, the script treats it as sympathetically as a Rattigan play, in ways I still find sophisticated. Mel loves his wife very deeply; he does not and has never desired her. She knows and does not know it; she married him aware of his feelings for men, but she was nineteen and starstruck and confident he would change. Perhaps he hoped he would. The hothouse culture of Cambridge in the '30's. One of those phases everyone goes through. But after years of trying, it is exquisitely clear that if Mel is bisexual, it is only in the most mechanical sense of the word—asked point-blank by her brother if the marriage has satisfied her, Laura Farr (Sylvia Syms) replies carefully, "He's very kind and understanding." She has a job working with troubled children at a local school, a kind of art therapy. They have no children of their own. "There hasn't been a day," Mel swears to her as they gaze out over the wet glitter of low tide and the chains of Hammersmith Bridge, "that I haven't thanked God for you." Her voice is soft but unyielding, her blonde hair blown in the January wind: "Mel, I'm not a lifebelt for you to cling to. I'm a woman and I want to be loved for myself."
So he has wronged not only the men he wasn't brave enough to love, but the woman he wasn't brave enough not to marry; he has not even done well by himself or he wouldn't look like he's haunting his own life. In 1961, in a movie where the language of homophobia is so pervasive that even gay characters talk of a "magic cure" or hold as a point of pride that they "never corrupted the normal," it stands out a post-Stonewall mile that Mel's real heroism is coming out. Practically, it's the only way to secure a conviction: "Blackmail is the simplest of crimes when we have the cooperation of the victim. Almost impossible when we haven't." Personally, it's the only way he can live. There are a lot of raw moments in this picture, but the most painful for me is the bitter ache in Mel's voice as he answers, slantwise, his wife's question of what he felt for Boy Barrett: "If it was love, why should I want to stamp it out? Why would I do that if it was love?" There is no apology but honesty, the thing he couldn't give the other man when he was alive. "I believe that if I go into court as myself," he explains almost as steadily as if it's some other man who'll be mocked and pilloried, disbarred and maybe jailed, "I can draw attention to the fault in the existing law." Like Turing reporting his burglary, only Mel the lawyer knows what he's getting into. And yet from the moment he's handed the photograph that Boy died to keep away from the authorities, there's nothing else to do. It must have landed in theaters like TNT.
That vote for truth and damn the consequences is still breathtaking; I suspect it is the primary reason that generations of later activism did not leave Victim in the dust. In other areas, I agree the movie hedges its bets. It does not endorse Mel's destructive self-denial, but it's impossible not to think that a queer but chaste hero was undoubtedly more palatable to straight audiences who could accept the theory of Dirk Bogarde wanting to kiss another man more readily than they would watch the actual tonsil hockey. The blackmail material itself is similarly complex and slightly cop-out. We never get a good look at the photo, but we learn eventually from a trustworthy third party that despite its threat it would never have held up as evidence in court: there's nothing really incriminating in it, only two men in a car with their faces close together, one of them crying. To Laura who knows what it's like to look at someone with unfulfilled love and sorrow, the expression on Mel's face tells the whole story, but a stranger might read it merely as distress at another person's pain, the kind of empathy that is permitted occasionally even between straight men. The script backs off repeatedly from confronting its audience with anything too sexual or even too far out of the mainstream. Cottaging? Renting? There's little camp, no Polari, almost nothing even in the way of slang except when a piece of whitewashed graffiti blares from the garage door that "FARR IS QUEER." Being a message picture, it stresses the travails of contemporary gay life rather than the culture and community being produced in spite of them. But it's not wall-to-wall pity-stacking and it is not totally ignorant of the lives that people make for themselves in the margins; I would not recommend it otherwise. I love the late scene where Mel meets Harold Doe (Norman Bird), the mousy bookseller whose painful history with Boy was one of our first clues to the nature of this elliptical half-world, because it plays exactly like the domestic drama that it is—the housewife and the glamorous homewrecker. "How dare you come in my shop?" the smaller man demands, all his proprietor's helpful smoothness dropped; he has the advantage of his slender, sharp-dressed visitor and he doesn't look as though it gives him any pleasure. "Boy Barrett was happy here with me. I'd have taken him into partnership. He'd have had a home here . . . Do you realize what you did?" Mel takes the words like a slap in the face: "I realize everything." It's obvious that it never once occurred to him that he was moving in on a household when he started picking Boy up. Why should it? He lives with his wife; he knows nothing of how men live with one another. Elsewhere we follow the exploits of P.H. and Mickey (Hilton Edwards and David Evans), a middle-aged couple who keep tabs on gossip at the Chequers with the bitchy sang-froid of a chorus and run an obscure sideline in petty crime; they are shady and engaging and we hope they make it back to Cheltenham all right. And right from the start of the picture, although his place in it is initially unclear, we have Donald Churchill's Eddy Stone. He's Boy's flatmate, a tube station ticket clerk who works nights and drinks at the Chequers; he looks like nothing special, a youngish man with a rumpled curl of dark hair, an anxious crescent face and a slight stammer, but he unhesitatingly goes to bat first for Boy and then for Mel and he seems to have skipped the self-hating stage altogether. He's not outspoken about his sexuality, but neither does he show any shame over it, just a reasonable concern about the hazards of amateur detecting. "If you do run them down," he's the first to tell Mel, "you'll bring yourself down as well." I wish the film did not lose track of him at the finale; he deserved to be present at the windup of a mystery he helped solve. I am still not sure if the dark-browed, lion-nosed plainclothes policeman played by John Bennett asks him out for coffee as part of his cover or just because he has good taste.
Dirk Bogarde was not William Haines. He never married to satisfy the Rank Organisation, but he managed his private life as carefully as any studio publicist; he maintained until the end of his life that his decades cohabiting with Anthony Forwood were purely platonic. But in the years after Melville Farr, there was no shortage of queer, weird, sexually controversial roles in his second, not at all destroyed career as a character actor and an arthouse darling—The Servant (1963), Accident (1967), The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), The Night Porter (1974)—and his haunted, determined performance is not the only reason it is impossible to imagine Victim without him: he wrote its most important scene himself. It is the scene in which Mel comes out to his wife. Even that makes it sound tidier than it is; it is a late-night argument that sprawls and tangles in a room as sharply lit and shadowed as anything out of RKO in the days of Anthony Mann, as Laura presses her husband for the truth and it shocks them both when she gets it. "I have a right to know!" she cries and he whirls on her like a stag at bay, a man who has always had his back to a wall, just now you can see it. He speaks quite crisply and quietly and then suddenly he's shouting, shaking with the importance of what he's saying. His words are extraordinary:
"All right. You want to know. I shall tell you. You won't be content until you know, will you? Till you've ripped it out of me. I stopped seeing him because I wanted him. Do you understand, because I wanted him!"
If the rest of the film had been earnest and embarrassing, it would still have been indispensable for these few lines, the unambiguous confession of physical desire by one man for another. Not knew, not loved. Wanted. There is a furious devastation in Mel's face, a desperate transparency of shame and defiance and grief. His wife can't meet his eyes. For a moment his face tightens as if he might cry, but instead he says, quietly again, "Now what good has that done you?" If he's asking the audience, immeasurable. His love smashed the fourth wall. It dared to speak its name.
It's still speaking, in voices that went beyond Bogarde's, beyond the bittersweet ending of Victim and into queerer, more radical, more joyous and angrier stories; I hear it even when my city hasn't just had a Pride parade. I was glad to hear it here, in a film that nearly sixty years and a legal sea-change later still has something to say. So it's not perfect—and it's not—it knows that has nothing to do with being valid, and human, and real. This landmark brought to you by my honest backers at Patreon.
no subject
Aw, well, that always is a good thing. :-)
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I always like being reminded that the past was a complicated place.
no subject
Its one non-negotiable position is the evil of homophobia, especially when signed into law and reinforced by a casual, cultural wall of indifference, contempt, and opportunism. --Been thinking a lot about that cultural wall...
Even more importantly, the film does not make the mistake of arguing that civil rights should be awarded on a basis of good conduct. --AMEN. That's a point that the the YA novel The Hate U Give (about a police murder of a Black kid) makes. And it's so, so important.
no subject
Thank you. It just went consistently beyond the marks it had to hit for its message—it could be cautious or naive, but it was never simplistic. Mel feels real, fifty-seven years later. The world through which he moves feels like a real world, not an argument. His moment of truth is electrifying; aftershocks from it crackle throughout the film, a blackmailer's sneer that he won't say as much in court and Mel's whip-thin smile, almost jaunty: "Oh, yes, I will." There's an earlier scene where he suggests almost casually to another closeted victim of blackmail, a West End star played close to the bone by Dennis Price, that he might use his position to raise awareness: "You're a star, Calloway. People like you set a fashion. If the young people knew how you lived, mightn't they think that an example to follow?" only for one of Calloway's boyfriends to cut in, smoothly missing or derailing the point: "Of course youth must be protected, we all agree about that." Mel lets it go, but it's one of the first signs that his thinking has begun to move beyond individual justice for Boy Barrett and into the realm of social justice. He'll set that fashion himself if he has to. Bogarde may not have been able to do the same as himself, but it is not a small thing that he did it as Mel. Like Leslie Howard at the end of Pimpernel Smith (1941), the actor speaking directly to history. And he was right that it would make a difference.
--Been thinking a lot about that cultural wall...
It's been smashing a lot of people in the face lately.
--AMEN. That's a point that the the YA novel The Hate U Give (about a police murder of a Black kid) makes. And it's so, so important.
It feels lately like we're fighting this point out all over again, in different branches of activism, and it's a distraction. People deserve human rights because they are human. Of course this administration doesn't want to say so, with its love of power games and shifting goalposts: ask nicely and we'll think about it. No one should have to ask nicely for air; you just breathe.
Did you write about this novel?
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I haven't written yet about The Hate U Give, but I intend to. I haven't quite "officially" finished it (but in fact I pretty much have). It's a wonderful book, and I wasn't expecting it to be. I wasn't expecting it to be *bad*, but I wasn't expecting it to have the breadth and depth that it has, or the beautiful--and sometimes funny--writing, and it has all that. Really good.
no subject
Love those extra quotes from the movie, and your insights--thank you.
You're welcome. I liked this movie and I like how much is in it.
but I wasn't expecting it to have the breadth and depth that it has, or the beautiful--and sometimes funny--writing, and it has all that. Really good.
I look forward to reading your writeup of it, and I'll look out for the book itself!
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FUCKING SERIOUSLY ahem
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I was just really impressed by how much of it is not just good for its time, but still nuanced and still relevant. I love making Mel a barrister, a man whose allegiance is almost second nature to the law, and then making him come to terms with the wrongness of the law. I love how culpable he is and how his redemption, if you want to call it that, is based on bucking everything the society he was born into has told him to do. It feels revolutionary that the film doesn't worry about conventional sympathy for any of its characters and still demands its audience care. And of course no one who made this film knew that decriminalization was on the horizon—they could hope, but they couldn't have confidence—but the modern viewer does, which means that it is possible to envision a happier ending for Mel in a few years than the one he can see for himself. In that slight alternate history that all fictional stories are, his activism should be well-remembered.
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The whole film is available on YouTube, although horizontally squished,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2xUteY_emM
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You're welcome, and thank you! The film has a lot in it. I didn't even get around to the cinematography or the document of changing London.
The whole film is available on YouTube, although horizontally squished
Well, at least the runtime's right. I watched it off FilmStruck, where it's part of Criterion's Basil Dearden box set. (I hate their site redesign.) I've actually seen three out of four of those movies and now that I look at them together, each has been a fascinatingly different social approach that never feels like a single-issue bludgeon. The League of Gentlemen (1960) is a heist comedy with teeth, post-war malaise and military nostalgia; All Night Long (1962) is a jazz remix of Othello ringing some of the best changes on Shakespeare I've seen on film. Victim is everything I've said. I should just make time for Sapphire (1959).
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....oooh.
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Which one? Both? (a.k.a. I vaguely take requests, when I stop having this three-day migraine)
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MIGRAINES. BAH.
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I would enjoy writing about All Night Long. I may write about some more queer film first. This week is probably a dead loss for anything other than paying work and helping friends move, though.
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Moving, DOUBLE blech.
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I mean, it's June. I never wrote about Maurice (1987). I never wrote about Call Me by Your Name (2017). I never wrote about Bound (1996), for God's sake. I just need more time.
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I SHALL SEE WHAT I CAN DO.
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I'm not saying it's like walking into a Mary Renault party
Not JUST for that bit. But that bit was awesome.
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I'm so glad. I think the movie's worth it.
Not JUST for that bit. But that bit was awesome.
Thank you!
Donald Churchill could have played Alec, actually: "dark, narrow-headed, nearly good-looking." I guess I have fancasting now.
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Thank you.
I'm not familiar enough with Bogarde's earlier films to know for sure whether Victim catapulted Bogarde into a more interesting, idiosyncratic career than he might have had otherwise, but it's hard to imagine him having made films like The Servant without having made Victim.
I have to see that; you've made it sound wonderful. I'm not sure I've seen anything from Bogarde's matinée idol period, either. I ran into his Tale of Two Cities (1958) once, but he was not Ronald Colman, so I didn't care. I keep meaning to see The Singer Not the Song (1960) not because it's supposed to be any good, but because the production story involves Bogarde objecting so much to being cast as a Mexican bandit that he played the role in tight black leather and flirted outrageously with John Mills.
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Thank you!
Also, I really need to see this movie at some point.
It's available on DVD from Criterion and streaming on Filmstruck; it also appears to exist in more nebulous form on the internet. Whenever and however you get to it, enjoy!