There would be another positive outcome from doing Victim. For more than a decade, female viewers had been drawn to his good looks and romantic presence on screen. But Victim changed that. It freed him from his ‘Idol of the Odeons’ image and was a career-changing moment. He noted:

‘It slung the whole of the Elvis Presley image. It busted the thing wonderfully wide open because the kids just fell away overnight like grass, not because I was playing a homosexual, because in English the word “queer” usually means that you’re not feeling very well, so they didn’t get it anyway, but I did have grey temples and I was broaching my own age, playing a man about 45. I wasn’t the bouncy, happy doctor with a little perm in the front lock of my hair and my caps in and my left profile . . . And so that all broke. The caps came out, the hair was never permed again, and a different audience came.’ (Guerin, 59)

This new audience realized that behind the handsome face was a serious actor. Reflecting on his work in Victim, Bogarde wrote: ‘I had achieved what I had longed to do for so long, to be in a film which disturbed, educated, and illuminated as well as merely giving entertainment. I had been fortuitously pointed in the right direction again, just in time . . . I was not to retreat ever again.’ (Snakes and Ladders, 202)