Victim is a 1961 British neo-noir suspense film directed by Basil Dearden and starring Dirk Bogarde and Sylvia Syms. The first British film to explicitly name homosexuality and deal with it sympathetically, it premiered in the UK on 31 August 1961 and in the US the following February.

Plot

Melville Farr is a successful barrister with 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. One day, Farr receives a call from Jack "Boy" Barrett, a young working-class gay man with whom he previously had a romantic friendship. Farr, who is apparently happily married to Laura, assumes Barrett wants to blackmail him about their relationship, so he does not listen and tells Barrett not to call him again. In reality, however, Barrett has been trying to reach Farr to appeal for help, because he has fallen prey to blackmailers who have a picture of Farr and Barrett in a vehicle together. The image is somewhat compromising, as Barrett is crying and Farr's arm is around him, so Barrett stole £2,300 (£ today) from his employers to pay the blackmail, but he has been found out and now the police are pursuing him, so he needs financial assistance to flee the country. After managing to borrow £20 from a friend, Barrett is picked up by the police, who quickly deduce that he is being blackmailed, and even make a connection to Farr when they recover a scrapbook of articles that Barrett was unable to successfully destroy before his capture. 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.