MOVIE CHRONICLE
567
VICTIM
It
was a bit startling to pick up an English newspaper and see that
the review of
Victim
was entitled "Ten-letter word"-but as it turned
out,
The Observer
was referring not to Lenny Bruce's much publicized
hyphenated word but to the simple term "homosexual," which it appears
is startling enough in a movie to make the Johnson office refuse to
give
Victim
a seal of approval.
I suppose it's too crude simply to say that
Victim
is
The Mark
in
drag but that's not so far from the truth. Like the man who wanted to
rape a child but didn't, the hero of
Victim
wants to but doesn't make
it with another guy. The lesser characters make out; they don't have
the hero's steel will, and they are very pathetic indeed, given to such
self-illuminating expressions as "Nature played me a dirty trick." I'm
beginning to long for one of those old-fashioned movie stereotypes-the
vicious, bitchy old queen who said mean, funny things. We may never
again have those Franklin Pangborn roles, now that homosexuals are
going to be treated seriously, with sympathy and respect, like Jews and
Negroes. It's difficult to judge how far sensitivities will go:
R emembrance
of Things Past
may soon be frowned upon like
Huckleberry Firm
and
The M erchant of Venice.
Social progress makes strange bedfellows.
Victim
manages to get past other censorial bodies by being basically
a thriller, a fairly slick suspense story about a blackmailing ring. But
it's a cleverly conceived
moralistic
thriller: as the victims of the ring
are homosexuals, various characters are able to point out the viciousness
of the English laws, which, by making homosexuality a crime, make
homosexuals the victims of ninety percent of the blackmail cases. Just
about everyone in the movie has attitudes designed to illuminate the
legal problems of homosexuality; without the thriller structure, the
moralizing message could get awfully sticky. As it is, the film is
moderately amusing.
A number of the reviewers were uneasy about the thesis that con–
senting adults should be free from legal prosecution for their sex habits;
they felt that if homosexuality were not a crime it would spread. (The
assumption seems to be that heterosexuality couldn't hold its own in a
free market.)
Time's
attitude to the film is a classic example of
Time's
capacity for worrying:
But what seems at first an attack on extortion seems at last a
coyly sensational exploitation of homosexuality as a theme–
and, what's more offensive, an implicit approval of homo-
