The Offence (1973)

Nice effects though.

Lack of good storyline.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

This has a most languorous and off putting pre-credit sequence that had me half closing my eyes even before the film proper had begun. And even then when it is clear there has been the most appalling over reaction by Sean Connery's character as police interrogator, that this is to be dealt with in flashback, had be seriously concerned that I was not likely to make it to the end. Things pick up, however, the script becomes more assured towards the end and Ian Bannen and Sean Connery give the performances of their lives. Paedophelia is a difficult enough subject to deal with on screen and here where the main investigator has his own demons in this area, it is even more fraught. Brave John Hopkins original play and Lumet does a decent enough job bringing it to the screen though it was presumably lack of adequate budget that means it tends to have that TV cop show look a lot of the time. Harrison Birtwistle an unusual choice for composer and he certainly turns out a quirky if at times discordant score.

Sean Connery is more a superstar than an actor. Although his talents have been recognised by the Academy (for his rather unconvincing turn as an Irish cop in The Untouchables (1987)) and remembered for his role as the first James Bond, he is high up on his own pedestal, a gift for voice actors and one of the handsomest faces ever to have graced the screen. But anyone in doubt of his ability as a proper thespian need look no further than his grim, tormented portrayal of a cop who has seen one too many dead bodies in Sidney Lumet's The Offence, a huge flop at the box office and a film now faded into memory, ripe for a re-discovery.Playing with time Rashomon (1950)-style, the film begins in slow motion, where an unknown disturbance at a police station has a few officers panicked. It is revealed to be Detective Sergeant Johnson (Connery) standing over the bloodied body of suspect Kenneth Baxter (Ian Bannen), with fellow police officers scattered on the floor. It then goes back, and we are in a grey, miserable city gripped in panic as a child-killing paedophile roams free. The latest disappearance of a young girl has Johnson riled, and officers cruising the street pick up Baxter, who is wandering alone in the night covered in mud. The young girl is found raped but alive by Johnson himself, who insists on spending some time alone with the suspect.Based on John Hopkins' stage play This Story of Yours, Connery fought tooth-and-nail to adapt it for the big screen, eventually reprising his role as Bond in Diamond Are Forever (1971) in return for the green-light. Although the film consists of long, talky scenes, Lumet uses stylish editing in order to avoid being stagy and to delve further into his anti-hero's head. His reputation as a no- nonsense director betrays him here, as scenes of gruesome murders, body parts, and a host of other atrocities Johnson has witnessed flash before our eyes. The use of slow motion in the flashback moments also employs a sort of circular filter at the centre of the screen, reflecting Johnson's disconnection from his actions but getting slightly tiresome in the process.There are three long, outstanding scenes. The first is Johnson returning home to his wife (Vivien Merchant) following his interrogation of Baxter, drinking heavily and exploding at the one person who could possibly help him. The second is Johnson's own interrogation with superintendent Cartwright (the ever-excellent Trevor Howard), a man who has witnessed the same level of horror himself, but has learnt to separate his work from his life, something Johnson is unable to do. The third is the extended interrogation of Baxter, where Bannen's creepy turn surely must have been an inspiration for the Joker-Batman verbal showdown in The Dark Knight (2008). It's incredibly bleak stuff, but the raw honesty of the script and performances makes this powerful stuff.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

The Offence is based on a play, and it shows. Very few locations- interrogation room, police quarters, a few outdoor scenes, Johnson's home- are punctuated by a whole lot of men (and one woman in a scene) talking in rooms. This doesn't dissuade a director like Sidney Lumet, however, who feeds the fire that actors crave, which is freedom to take some risky material anywhere it needs to go. In this case it's about a detective who is on a child murder/raper case who in the midst of the manhunt finds in one night a girl who survived in the woods, and a suspect who is picked up as a vagrant in the middle of the night. He gets somehow alone in an interrogation room with the man (Ian Bannen) and, in what seems like no time at all, the man is dead and Johnson (Connery) is half-shocked and half-not-surprised at himself for what he's done.The rest of the film is introspective self-inquiry, and a closer with a double-back (perhaps influenced a little by Rashomon though not entirely) on what really happened in that interrogation room. While Lumet implements some "subliminal" cuts into some scenes to show in Johnson's mind how the "pictures" he sees his head, the thoughts and memories of crimes and victims and blood and bodies over a twenty year career as a cop, they don't really act as being effective for much longer past the first scene (a bring white ring on the screen kind of wears itself out after the eerie opening scene too). It's a shame since Lumet previously used the technique in The Pawnbroker and this time just didn't connect with it. It is, sad to say, dated and not totally necessary to get inside of Connery's headspace (not that the image of the woman dead and tied up to the bed won't stick with me for a while either, I should admit).But it's all in Connery's expressions, his voice trembling and devastated by what he's done, while also in the knowledge that there was no other way he could get around it. What's revealing about Johnson through the course of the film, and how Connery phenomenally plays it, is not how monstrous he is but how recognizable he is. He's a mad policeman, sure, but how he got that way is what counts. He was 'normal' once, or just a decent cop, and somehow after years of exposure he couldn't put it aside or live two lives as Trevor Howard's character suggests. Instead he internalized it, and it all boiled up to a head with his interrogation of Baxter. When Lumet finally gets to this very long scene, which closes out the film, its so epic it may make one reevaluate the interrogation scene of Batman versus the Joker in the Dark Knight. It's one of those actor set-pieces that scorches the floor dramatically. Sadly, the rest of the film doesn't quite hold up to the same intensity (though Connery does).

After returning to save the James Bond franchise with "Diamonds Are Forever," Sean Connery made a complete left-field choice for his next role. In "The Offence," he plays a stressed-out police officer on the verge of a nervous breakdown who is in a physical and psychological battle with a paedophile suspect he has in custody. Connery's character is also struggling with his own paedophile tendencies. It is an adaptation of John Hopkins play "This Story of Yours." It is essentially a two-hander for the most part with Connery and Ian Bannen (as the paedophile) trying to get the better of one another in the interrogation room of a police station.Even though Sean Connery won his only Oscar for "The Untouchables", for me, this is by far his best performance. He is an absolute powerhouse in this going from shouting, snarling rage to raving and ranting about paedophiles to then sobbing like a child and begging forgiveness.Ian Bannen is, if anything, even better than Connery here. His character veers from confused innocence to leering guilt, from screaming frustration to self-pity and then back to arrogance. It's an amazing performance. Sadly, Ian Bannen was killed in a car crash a few years back. A huge loss to the acting community.While "The Offence" on the surface seems like a very British police procedural drama, it was, surprisingly, directed by the American Sidney Lumet. Like Lumet's best movies ("Twelve Angry Men," "The Hill", "Serpico" and "Dog Day Afternoon") this film features a character in an extremely pressurized situation. It's brave film-making at its darkest. Hollywood certainly took notice as Lumet was chosen to direct a young Al Pacino in two of his breakthrough movies "Serpico" in 1973 and "Dog Day Afternoon" in 1975 after this.This is the kind of film that would not only never be made today, to even suggest it as an idea for a film would probably be the end of your career. So, if you're tired of CGI monsters and explosions and you want to experience raw acting at its finest, get a copy of this film. It is uncomfortable viewing due to its disturbing subject matter, but you won't see better acting anywhere. Highly recommended.