Film-maker Terence Davies once told me how as a teenager – Catholic, in the closet, terrified – he saw Victim one night at a packed Liverpool cinema. About 20 minutes into the story a police detective lets slip the word “homosexual”. As Davies recalled of the audience, “you could have heard a pin drop”.
This was 1961, six years before the practice of homosexuality was decriminalised. The personal impact of the film upon him, and countless others, was immeasurable.