Victim is a 1961 British neo-noir suspense film directed by Basil Dearden and starring Dirk Bogarde and Sylvia Syms.

One day, Farr receives a call from Jack "Boy" Barrett, a young working-class gay man with whom he previously had a romantic friendship.

Knowing it will only be a matter of time before he is forced to reveal the details of the blackmail scheme and Farr's role, Barrett hangs himself in a police cell.

Farr promises to testify at the blackmailers' trial, even though the ensuing press coverage will certainly destroy his career and reputation, as he hopes his involvement will help draw attention to the problems with the existing laws against homosexuality.

However, public opprobrium, even in the absence of criminal prosecution, continued to require homosexuals to keep their identity secret and made them vulnerable to blackmail.

The scriptwriter Janet Green had previously collaborated with Basil Dearden on a British "social problem" film, Sapphire (1959), which dealt with racism against Afro-Caribbean immigrants to the United Kingdom in the late 1950s.

After reading the Wolfenden report, and knowing of several high-profile prosecutions of gay men, Green became a keen supporter of homosexual law reform.

[7] As Pauline Kael wrote:[7] 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.

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 heterosexual life.The language the screenplay used to describe its controversial subject attracted comment.

When the team of producer Michael Relph and director Basil Dearden first approached Bogarde, several actors had already turned down the role, including Jack Hawkins, James Mason, and Stewart Granger.

Reportedly, Bogarde himself wrote the scene in which Farr admits to his wife that he is gay and has continued to be attracted to other men, despite his earlier assurances to the contrary.

"[10] He wrote years later in his autobiography that his father had suggested he make an adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge, "But I did Victim instead, ... playing the barrister with the loving wife, a loyal housekeeper, devoted secretary and the Secret Passion.

[9] An anonymous reviewer in The Times commented that "Victim may not say a great deal about" the related issues of the nature of 'love' and gay men's "genuine feeling" for each other, "but what it does say is reasoned and just; and it does invite a compassionate consideration of this particular form of human bondage".

[22] However, Terence Kelly of Sight and Sound saw problems with the film, and wrote that Victim contains "a tour of the more respectable parts of the London homosexual underworld, with glimpses of the ways in which different men cope with or are destroyed by their abnormality", but he did comment that "the film unequivocally condemns the way" blackmail "is encouraged by the present state of the law".

[23] Bosley Crowther wrote that the film "appears more substantial and impressive than its dramatic content justifies" because "it deals with a subject that heretofore has been studiously shied away from or but cautiously hinted at on the commercial screen".

He found the script "routine" and "shoddily constructed" as drama, but successful as a political argument:[5] [A]s a frank and deliberate exposition of the well-known presence and plight of the tacit homosexual in modern society it is certainly unprecedented and intellectually bold.

The very fact that homosexuality as a condition is presented honestly and unsensationally, with due regard for the dilemma and the pathos, makes this an extraordinary film.Crowther qualified his praise of Bogarde's acting, saying that "Dirk Bogarde does a strong, forceful, forthright job, with perhaps a little too much melancholy and distress in his attitude, now and again", and summed up his mixed view with the statement: "While the subject is disagreeable, it is not handled distastefully.

"[25] As such, Waters argues that the film portrays homosexuality in a sensationalised way that would have deliberately drawn public attention to the issue.

Bradshaw wrote that Bogarde's lighting is more haunting than necessary in the confrontation scenes with his wife, and noticed similarities to the work of Patrick Hamilton, especially "the seedy, nasty world of pubs and drinking holes around ... London's West End", concluding his review with the statement: "It is perhaps in its evocation of the strange, occult world of blackmail, conspiracy and shame, and the seediness of a certain type of London, that Victim holds up best.

"[26] Victim became a highly sociologically significant film, and many believe it played an influential role in liberalising attitudes and the laws in Britain regarding homosexuality.

[27] Alan Burton conducted a 2010 study of "various documents relating to the Wolfenden Report, public opinion, censorship, and the production and reception of Victim," and found that the film, which "has attracted much criticism and debate, largely in terms of its liberal prescriptions and its 'timid' handling of a controversial theme", had "significant impact on gay men who struggled with their identity and subjectivity at a time when their sexuality was potentially illegal".

[28] The film was released on DVD by The Criterion Collection in January 2011[29] as part of their "Eclipse Series" box set "Basil Dearden’s London Underground".

[31][32] In July 2017, marking the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act, BBC Radio 3 broadcast a play dramatising the making of the film, with Ed Stoppard as Bogarde.