SCREEN ICONS: DIRK BOGARDE****
The Oscar voters have committed many sins of omission, but none more grievous than denying even a single nomination to Dirk Bogarde, who was born in 1921 and died in 1999. A remarkable actor, he came to fame as a matinee idol in light British comedies and promptly turned his back on them to work in such then-daring movies as Victim(1961), as a secretly gay lawyer tackling a blackmailer of homosexuals.
Victimis one of seven films on this boxset, three of them from Bogarde's fruitful collaborations with blacklisted expatriate US director Joseph Losey. In The Sleeping Tiger(1954), Bogarde plays a young burglar taken on as a social guinea pig by a liberal psychiatrist (Alexander Knox), whose wife (Alexis Smith) he seduces.
Bogarde gives a towering performance as the subtly manipulative title character in The Servant(1963), Losey's powerful British class drama scripted by Harold Pinter and featuring James Fox, Sarah Miles and Wendy Craig.
Pinter also scripted Bogarde's last film for Losey, Accident(1967), a fascinating drama in which Bogarde (as an Oxford don) heads a fine cast including Michael York, Stanley Baker, Vivien Merchant and Delphine Seyrig.
Completing the set are The Blue Lamp(1950), with Bogarde as a hoodlum and Jack Warden introducing his future TV character, Dixon of Dock Green; Hunted(1952), as a young fugitive on the run with a physically abused boy (Jon Whiteley); and The Spanish Gardener(1956), which reunited Bogarde and Whiteley for a Costa Brava drama.
