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WHO IS 'VICTIM?!

Intermediary Sex Is Blackmailed

By W. Ward Marsh

"The Victim” Loew's State

"THE VICTIM,” melodrama directed by Basil Dearden. Original screenplay by Janet Green and John McCormick. Produced by Michael Relph, released by Pathe-America Distributing Company and played by the following cast:

Laura.....................、`

Melville Farr.............. ..Dirk Bogarde ..Sylvia Syms Calloway..........................................Dennis Price Jack Barret.............Peter McEnery Eddy.. !...............................................Donald Churchill

On the surface at least "The Victim," the British film in Loew's State, is a story of blackmail.

Immediately underneath it is a melodrama of extortion from a handful of the intermediary sex in England where being a homosexual is a crime and not an illness.

If you wonder why these unfortunates should be dramatized, ask yourself why

SO many read W WARD MARSH "The Well of Loneliness" or went to the theater to see "The Captive" or why Tenneessee Williams has profitably viewed them with, say, "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "Suddenly Last Summer?"

I should say that perhaps it took a good deal of courage on the part of Dirk Bogarde, one of England's finest actors, to play the lead in this film.

Not because he was given a powerful and sympathetic role by scripters Janet Green and John McCormick, who have written other strong screen scripts, but because he does admit the reason he broke off a friendship with a young fellow who later committed suicide was because he had been drawn to him. Blackmail

Bogarde sacrifices name, honor, relationship with a wife he truly loves, and his future as a young barrister slated for a major role in British politics, to run down a gang of black-

mailers and turn them over to the law.

While so doing, he seeks the help and gets nothing-from the homosexuals who are being blackmailed. None is presented in the slapstick fashion of mincing dandies but as frightened ones who have both law and nature against them.

Let none of this come as a shock. Pry into the lives of some great writers, composers, even greatest artists and you'll far more appreciate the excellent characterization Bogarde has created in this picture. and the courage all the others must have had to tell a story. of unnatural lawbreakers who have both the police and vultures against them.

The supporting cast is superb.

logue throughout is natural, taut and as real as the situations.

The scene between Bogarde and Miss Syms, as man and "The Victim" is no ordinary wife, when she forces him to melodrama. It deals with unmake a confession she does not want to hear is unquestionfortunates who too often do ably one of the screen's tensnot consider their lot a misest and most dramatic mofortune at all and deals with ments. them so realistically that it is For that matter, the diastark tragedy.