Film · 1961 · Films · 1960s
Victim
Scored from 72 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
Basil Dearden's British thriller follows Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde), a successful London barrister close to taking silk, who learns that a young man he had abruptly cut off, Jack Barrett (Peter McEnery), was arrested for theft and hanged himself in a police cell. Barrett had been stealing to pay a blackmailer holding a photograph of the two of them together. Sex between men was then a criminal offence in England, which left such victims unable to go to the police; Farr sets out to trace the ring anyway, knowing that a witness box would end his career and expose his marriage to Laura (Sylvia Syms). It is a black-and-white crime melodrama, the first English-language feature to use the word 'homosexual'.
Victim (1961) is a film IMDb files under the drama genre. It runs 1h 40m. It was made in the United Kingdom. It is rated X (BBFC).
A second review pool sits behind it as well: 109 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Only 72 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 72 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. 1,928 other films from the 1960s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Victim lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1960s (1,929 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 72.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
