Plot
A successful barrister, Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde) has a thriving London practice. He is on course to become a Queen's Counsel and people are already talking of him being appointed a judge. He is apparently happily married to his wife, Laura (Sylvia Syms).
Farr is approached by "Boy" Barrett (Peter McEnery), a younger working class man with whom Farr shared a romantic but asexual relationship. Farr rebuffs the approach, thinking Barrett wants to blackmail him about their relationship. What Farr does not know is that Barrett himself has fallen prey to blackmailers who know of their relationship. The blackmailers have a picture of Farr and Barrett in a vehicle together, in which Barrett is crying. Barrett has been trying to reach Farr to appeal for help since Barrett (a construction site wages clerk) has stolen £2,000 from his employers to pay the blackmail and the police are now onto him. With Farr intentionally avoiding him, Barrett is soon picked up by the police, who in turn discover why he was being blackmailed. Knowing it will be only a matter of time before he is forced to reveal Farr's identity as the other man, Barrett hangs himself in a police cell.
After discovering the truth of what happened to Barrett, Farr takes on the blackmail ring and recruits a friend of Barrett's to investigate for him. The friend identifies a gay hairdresser who has also been victimized by the ring, but the hairdresser refuses to divulge who his tormentors are. However, when the hairdresser is visited by one of the blackmailers, he suffers a heart attack. Prior to his death, he manages to phone Farr's house to leave a mumbled message referring to another victim of the ring.
Farr contacts this victim, a famous actor, who refuses to help him, instead preferring, along with other victims, to acquiesce to the blackmail in hopes of keeping their secret. Laura finds out about Barrett's death and confronts her husband, demanding he tell her the truth. In a heated argument, it turns out that before their marriage Farr had had a relationship with another man who subsequently killed himself when the relationship ended. He had told Laura about this before they married and promised that he no longer had such urges, but on learning of this new affair, Laura decides to leave him.
The blackmailers vandalise Farr's property, painting "FARR IS QUEER" on his garage doors. Farr resolves to help the police catch them and promises to give evidence in court, despite knowing that the ensuing press coverage will certainly destroy his career. Working with the police, Farr succeeds in ensnaring the blackmailers, who are arrested. He is then surprised to find his wife still at home. He tells her he prefers her to go ahead and leave so she will not have to face the brutal ugliness that will befall him during the trial. But he lets her know he will welcome her return when the ordeal is over. She tells him that she believes she has found the strength to do so. Farr then burns the picture that originally incriminated him.
Read more about this topic: Victim (1961 film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
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They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)