Anyone who has seen his role early in his career in Quartet (1948) as a would-be concert pianist who kills himself when told he will not make the grade, or in The Blue Lamp, made in 1949 at Ealing, will require no further evidence of what star quality Bogarde had. His incarnation of the vile, manipulative, shallow delinquent who shoots Jack Warner, playing a policeman, outside a cinema in the Edgware Road is utterly convincing, and contributes to its being one of the pivotal moments of British culture. Bogarde is superb, too, in portraying the fear and panic of the murderer as the police net closes in upon him. The film made him a star, but what would happen in the 1950s when what passed for the British film industry sought to exploit that stardom was often pretty regrettable.

There were, unfortunately most memorably, various Doctor films — these lasted until 1963. There were various star vehicles with him playing either vexed, suave individuals or vexed, unsuave ones. He managed to get miscast with alarming frequency, usually when playing men of action (though Bogarde himself had had a good war). His portrayal of Paddy Leigh Fermor in Ill Met by Moonlight (1957) is at times risibly camp. If attempts to have him play NCOs were designed to display his range, they did not work. His part as a gibbering wreck in a life raft in The Sea Shall Not Have Them (1954) does not quite come off, and as a sergeant in The Password is Courage (1962) he is never near convincing. In some respects, Bogarde is almost a one-man representation of the decline of the British film in the 1950s: poor scripts, poor roles, the directors always looking over their shoulders at big brother in Hollywood.

But Victim seemed to usher in a period in Bogarde's career in which, whether he became more discriminating or directors and writers realised the opportunities they were missing with him, he started regularly to make not just good, but sometimes exceptional films. Victim was the first of these; then, in 1963, the same year as his last outing as Simon Sparrow, his role as a gentleman's very ungentlemanly gentleman in The Servant. In 1964 he distinguished himself as a compassionate officer in the Great War drama King and Country; in 1965 he was with Julie Christie in Darling; in 1967 there was Accident; and in 1971, having reached the age of 50, he was exactly right to play von Aschenbach in Death in Venice. By that point, after a promising start and a troublesome continuation, Bogarde really had shown himself a great film actor.

Consideration of these films from the late-middle period of his career reminds us of his enormous talent. It also demands a serious retrospective. I can't recall when I last saw one of his great 1960s films on television, though his rubbish is on all too often. But Coldstream reminds us to go back to Victim and the Bogarde revaluation should start there.