Metacritic reviews

This gripping thriller, part of the BFI's Bogarde retrospective, daringly smashed through 1961's homosexual taboos, but has weathered best as a study of blackmail and paranoia.

The movie proceeds on two levels, as a crime thriller and as a character study, and it's this dual nature that makes it an entertainment at the same time it works as a message picture.

While some may be put off by talk of ”abnormalities,” the inner struggle depicted so poignantly in Victim has not dated at all.

This is telling, moving stuff.

Victim has a neat plot, deft direction by Basil Dearden, and the sort of grum good manners one expects of the British in these trying situations. It also has a careful performance by Bogarde, and it pursues with eloquence and conviction the case against an antiquated statute.

A brave British melodrama from 1961, one of this country's first explorations of gay life on screen.

A liberal film on the subject of homosexuality rather than the radical film some considered it at the time, Victim still stands as an intelligent film attempting to address an important social issue.

Victim, for all its compromises, offers a rich mosaic of minor characters, none of them particularly complex but each articulating some British attitude toward homosexuality and the law surrounding it.

As a straight piece of blackmail melodrama, it is a good bit below the British par. But as 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.

Ingenious, moralistic, and moderately amusing.