Victim was released in the UK on 31 August 1961.
Screenwriter Janet Green was a proponent of gay rights (when homosexuality was still a crime) and wrote Victim with her husband John McCormick in order to bring attention to the issue and instigate reform.
39-year-old Dirk Bogarde was one of the most popular film stars in the UK, and while it had been rumored that he was gay, he frequently played romantic lead roles. Bogarde quickly agreed to take the lead role of Melville Farr, a married man who is blackmailed for his past gay life (it is said that 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). It was the wisest decision I ever made in my cinematic life,” Bogarde said in a 1988 interview. “It is extraordinary to believe that this modest film could ever have been considered courageous, daring or dangerous to make. It was, in its time, all three.”
Director Basil Deardon described the film as "an open protest against Britain's law that being a homosexual is a criminal act.”
While the film is incredibly tame (even by the standards of the day), the British Board of Film Censors gave it an X rating ("to the great majority of cinema-goers, homosexuality is outside their direct experience and is something which is shocking, distasteful and disgusting"). When it was released in the US in 1962, the MPAA initially refused to approve the film but later in the year lifted its ban on films “using homosexuality as a plot device.”
