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PAULINE KAEL
sexuality as a practice. Almost all the deviates in the film
are fine fellows-well dressed, well spoken, sensitive, kind ...
Nowhere does the film suggest that homosexuality is a serious
(but often curable) neurosis that attacks the biological basis
of life itself.
On one page
Time
is worried about the population explosion, and
on the next it's upset because homosexuals aren't reproducing. (An
unwarranted assumption, by the way.)
Time
should really be very happy with the movie, because 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. Oedipus didn't merely
want to sleep with Jocasta; he slept with her.
I
There is, incidentally, a terribly self-conscious and unconvincing
attempt to distinguish between the "love" the barrister feels for his wife
and the physical desire-presumably some lower order of emotion–
that he felt for a boy who is more interesting in every way than his
wife. And I find it difficult to accept all the upper-class paraphernalia
of stage melodrama; it's hard to believe in people who live at the level
on which if you feel insulted by someone's conversation, you show him
the door. A minor problem in trying to take
Victim
seriously even as a
thriller is that the suspense involves a series of "revelations" that several
of the highly-placed characters have been concealing their homosexuality;
but actors, and especially English actors, generally look so queer anyway,
that it's hard to be surprised at what we've always taken for granted-
in fact, in this suspense context of who is and who isn't, it's hard to
believe in the actors who are supposed to be straight.
Some months ago, reviewing
The Mark,
I discussed the uncomfort–
able feeling I got that we were supposed to feel sympathetic toward
the hero because he was such a pained, unhappy, dull man, and that
his sexual problem was the only focus of interest in him. In
Victim
there is so much effort to make us feel sympathetic toward the homo–
sexuals that they are never even allowed to be
gay.
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 the heterosexual life.
LOLITA
The ads asked "How did they ever make a movie of
Lolita
for per–
sons over 18 years of age?" but did not attempt an answer; the suggestion
