The Offence
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| The Offence | |
|---|---|
| Image:The Offence.jpg original film poster |
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| Directed by | Sidney Lumet |
| Produced by | Denis O'Dell |
| Written by | John Hopkins |
| Starring | Sean Connery Trevor Howard Vivien Merchant Ian Bannen Peter Bowles Derek Newark Ronald Radd |
| Music by | Harrison Birtwistle |
| Cinematography | Gerry Fisher |
| Editing by | John Victor-Smith |
| Distributed by | United Artists |
| Release date(s) | 1972 |
| Running time | 112 min. |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $1,000,000 |
| IMDb profile | |
The Offence is a 1972 drama film, based upon the acclaimed 1968 stage play This story of yours by John Hopkins, directed by Sydney Lumet under the working title Something like the truth. It stars Sean Connery as a frustrated, obsessively aggressive police detective who snaps and kills a suspect (Ian Bannen) for personal reasons which are explored over the course of the film yet not fully revealed until the end. The tagline is "After 20 years what Detective-Sergeant Johnson has seen and done is destroying him."
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[edit] Plot summary
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This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (December 2007) |
Detective-Sergeant Johnson (Connery), has been a police officer for 20 years, and is deeply affected by the murders, rapes, and other serious crimes he has investigated.
His anger surfaces while interrogating a suspected child molester, Baxter (Ian Bannen in a BAFTA-nominated role), whom he brutally beats and kills. Johnson is suspended, goes home for the night to his unloving wife (Vivien Merchant). Johnson is interrogated by Detective Superintendent Cartwright (Trevor Howard) the next day, and during the interrogation he remains uncooperative and aggressive, constantly referring to the horrors of his job.
Over the course of the film, flashbacks occur to the night when Johnson killed the suspect, and we find out that at first we only saw limited glimpses of the actual events. In the end it is revealed that Johnson's constant referral to his job as an excuse are just a facade; Johnson tortured and killed Baxter because of his repressed desire to commit the crimes Baxter is accused of. The film's defining line of dialogue turns out to be Baxter's disgusted and terrified "Don't beat me for thoughts in your head, things that you like to do! I wouldn't have your thoughts!" Johnson later admits the real events in secret at the end of the film.
[edit] Background
When Connery agreed to return as James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever, United Artists pledged to back two of Connery's film projects of his own free choosing, including free choice for his own role, provided they would be costing $2m or less. The Offence, made under the working title of Something like the truth due to Connery's choice of Hopkins' script, was completed in one month with a budget of $1 million.
It was a commercial failure and did not yield a profit for nine years, even going unreleased in several markets including France. United Artists pulled out of the deal and the next project, a film version of Macbeth that Connery was to direct, was scotched by Roman Polanski's adaptation.
[edit] Critics
"A fascinating look at the human psyche based on Z Cars scriptwriter John Hopkins acclaimed stage play This Story of Yours, The Offence is an expertly crafted study of evil and human weakness that demands to be watched in its entirety. [...] it still packs quite a punch and features compelling performances from both Sean Connery and Ian Bannen."
- Britmovie
"Less well-known than his other British pictures (The Hill, The Deadly Affair, Murder on the Orient Express), this unrelentingly somber policier inaugurates a newfound force in Lumet’s work. The story, adapted by John Hopkins from his play, abounds in stylistic tics (recurring visual motifs, various events replayed several times, color coding), but the flashiness that pockmarked much of the director’s earlier work has been pruned to hushed, concentrated intensity. Likewise, the movie looks ahead to the bathed-in-gray thematics of Lumet’s later studies of law & order ambivalence -- Connery’s pressure-cooker copper, plagued with lurid images palpitating inside his brain, is the template for the protagonists of Serpico, Prince of the City and Q & A. Connery pinpoints some fantastic shadings of bullying, dissatisfaction and self-disgust, matched by Bannen’s peerless razzing -- the culminating pounding is less liberating purgation than guilt transference, christened by Bannen’s bloodied leer."
- Fernando F. Croce, Cinepassion
"The notion of a 'good cop' becoming corrupted by the day to day horrors of his job is nothing new, but it plays out in a way that is completely engrossing, even edge-of-your-seat suspenseful. [...] Ultimately Lumet is less concerned with constructing a whodunit than he is in exploring the dynamic between these two seemingly disparate men, who become more and more alike as their interrogation plays out. [...] The end result is Connery's realization (unspoken) that he is, in fact, of the same 'species' as the people he has so bitterly denounced throughout the film. [...] His moment of clarity is not a moment of 'redemption' so much as it is an acceptance of personal guilt.
The central performances are absolutely brilliant. Connery has never been better, even if he did win an Academy Award for The Untouchables (1987). [...] had this film been better received in 1972, his performance would have garnered him an Oscar nomination. Bannen takes a character that, on the printed page, may have seemed completely unsavory and makes him oddly likable. [...] Trevor Howard and Vivien Merchant also do superb work in their smaller roles [...].
An absolutely fantastic film, The Offence deserves to be far better known and revered. Few films have been as successful at being so ambiguous as well as so dialogue-heavy."
