Customer Reviews

The Offence

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Anyone wondering about the true acting ability of Sean Connery should catch this grim psychological drama directed with stark realism (as usual) by Sidney Lumet. I knew he could act through the smirks and savoir faire of James Bond and other big movies but the roles always lesser than the surrounding spectacle. 'The Offence' finds Connery in a stripped-down, rough little movie that pits his detective against the late Ian Bannen's child molester suspect. The battle of wits breaks only to look at the cop's equally distressing marital life. Yes, a tough one to watch but marvel at the sheer power of Connery's performance as the driven yet ambivalent detective. If you're a Connery fan, or just a lover of good acting, check this out.

Long before Sean Connery accepted the Best Supporting Actor for 1987's THE UNTOUCHABLES, he'd already proven himself to not only be one of the 20th Century's biggest movie stars but an actor capable of immersing himself in a role with the best.

I'll always believe that it was Connery's conviction as an actor that helped make the James Bond movies resonate so strongly with the Sixties moviegoing public. No matter how outrageous the situation, you believed it because he believed it. He quickly grew bored with the role as the scripts began imitating themselves and sought other roles to better define himself as an actor, not a movie star (as if being one of the biggest movie stars in the world was such a bad thing!).

Connery's talents are all on display in THE OFFENCE, a Sidney Lumet-directed film about a cop who goes over the edge. The film takes you into the tortured mind of a police detective who's seen too much, a big man not quite big enough for the corrosive overall effects of hunting down a child killer.

Most of the film takes place in an interrogation room as Connery plays a cat-and-mouse verbal game with a suspect who may or may not be his man. The result is fatal to the suspect and fatal to Connery's psyche.

It doesn't look like this film is available on DVD yet in the United States but it has been showing on cable TV channels. It's well worth watching to see great performances so check it out if you get the chance.

I think my favorite Connery performance is THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING in 1975. Bottom line is: he's always good. In THE OFFENCE, he's great.

A small English film, well done and many other things, but the interest is not in the plot because we know from the very start who the rapist is. But the whole interest of the film is how the rapist does not know he is one, does not remember his crime and how his memory is going to come back little by little, though it will take him killing another - at least - man who managed to see through his official innocence. That shows how being a rapist is a very special crime. It is a secret crime that happens in the deepest depth of one's mind and of which the rapist himself is not conscious, though his subconscious, when it takes over to guide him through the crime, is extremely well organized and makes him do exactly what is necessary for him to succeed and to go through it without any problem or opposition. This subconscious is also strong enough to make him forget about the crime entirely so that he does not have to hide anything since he does not know any more, though he does not need his torch in the night to go back to the girl in the woods, and her reaction confirms in our eyes the fact he is the rapist even if he is trying to comfort her now. And yet that subconscious is trying to hide the tracks of the crime by looking for an easy scapegoat who would in a way or another accept, willy-nilly or unwillingly if necessary, to be the surrogate rapist. The transfer of another transfer, and that is the beginning of the fall of the rapist because he will become a criminal of his own. And we are set wondering how it is possible for a criminal of that type to mislead his surrounding co-workers or even relatives and acquaintances into believing he is an innocent good man. How can crime hide so well and so deep in a man's deeper layers of his personality? Apart from that tricky psychological side of the film, it is rather simple and uneventful. But just try to imagine how he is going to realize he is the rapist and how the people around him are going to realize he is the rapist. And we can only have a flitting picture of what he did to the various witnesses or people who are in his way to leveling the witnesses into the ground. Quite a bloody trail.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

Some of the MGM Limited Edition titles have been very nice, such as 99 RIVER STREET, but others like THE HAWAIIANS and THE SATAN BUG have been nearly unwatchable. This film, THE OFFENCE, isn't a total loss, but it has DVD authoring issues. Jerky motion artifacts on pans and lots of jaggies in the image. Color and contrast-wise the image looks great, it's just when characters (or the camera) move around that the image falls apart. Might not be too bad on a small television, but is a chore to sit through on a big screen.

Anything directed by Sidney Lumet is worth considering. This is one of his very best. A dark and disturbing story, featuring two brilliant performances by Sean Connery and Ian Bannen. Its no coincidence that 'The Hill' from eight years earlier was also directed by Lumet and featured Connery and Bannen.

Connery is Sergeant Johnson a Policeman who after twenty years of dealing with murders, rapes and other violent crimes has had enough. Bannen plays child molester Kenneth Baxter who Johnson has to interrogate. His interrogation is brutal and Johnson starts to doubt whether he is any better than the man he is interrogating. This is a grim and depressing film throughout, yet somehow its one that always surprises me when I see it again. I think this is down to Connery's massive screen prescence, although it helps to have one of the best Directors as well of course.

This is only a 15 on DVD in the UK, but some may find the subject matter and general downbeat nature of the film off-putting. If in doubt I would rent it first.

The Offence tends to have been relegated to a trivia question these days (what was the film United Artists agreed to make as part of their deal to get Sean Connery to play Bond in Diamonds Are Forever?). On some levels it is dated, but the power of Connery's truly extraordinary performance is undiminished. A man almost totally morally decayed by the horrors of the job who sees something he recognises in himself in the suspect in a series of child-rapes (an almost equally impressive Ian Bannen), with terrible consequences, it's a ferocious outpouring of anger and contempt crying out for help he simply won't accept. The eternally under-rated Sidney Lumet's direction is bold and cinematic despite the theatrical origins (the play Something Like the Truth by Thunderball co-writer John Hopkins), the film's dulled palette mirrored by the half-finished grey concrete of the modernist police station: with its large windows looking out at pure blackness, it's more a reflection of the character's state of mind than an attempt at a realistic representation, but it's an entirely appropriate arena.

The R2 disc, like most of MGM/UA's European releases, sadly contains no extras even though footage of the rehearsals exists and occasionally turns up on documentaries, but does boast an acceptable widescreen transfer.

To say "The Offence" is a disappointment would be an understatement. Any film starring Sean Connery and directed by Sidney Lumet that lacks any kind of resonance would be. Connery is not at fault here because he gives his all as a police inspector beoming unhinged through the combination of his experience and personal demons. His role harkens back to a similar one played by Clint Eastwood in the underrated "Tightrope". Where the film lets down is in the shockingly lackluster direction of Sidney Lumet and a script that doesn't evolve very far from it's stage origins. The key word here is staginess. Lumet didn't know how to open this film up for the big screen and it never really takes off. The film is watchable but with the material and the starpower on hand you wonder what might have been. This film is best recommended to Connery and Lumet afficienados and others beware.

England, 1973: Detective Sergeant Johnson (Sean Connery) is a hard-bitten veteran of some twenty years in the police force and one of the lead detectives working towards the capture of a serial child molester who is menacing the satellite town which he calls home. Johnson is an abrasive man who is barely able to contain his simmering resentment towards his lack of promotion, superiors whom he considers to be witless, and a loveless marriage. His inherent animosity towards the world is driven to breaking point when he crosses swords with Kenneth Baxter (Ian Bannen), an erudite, successful family man who becomes a suspect in the investigation. Over the course of one night, events come to a violent head whilst Baxter is in police custody; but what precipitated the violence? And what was the real motivation behind the offence?

"The Offence" is an important film for two reasons: Firstly, it was one of the first widely released theatrical films featuring a major star to deal with the subject of child molestation (and it's consequences) in a populist medium; and secondly it is one of about three films where the audience is treated to the sight of Sean Connery ACTOR rather than Sean Connery MOVIE STAR. For my money, Connery is an actor who, Post-Bond, really coasted through the majority of his career playing a caricature of his 007 persona and who only ever really flexed his acting chops in two films - "The Offence" and "The Hill", both of which were directed by the late, great Sidney Lumet. Personally speaking, this film pips "The Hill" (which is similarly brilliant) to the post for me because Connery as an actor expresses a degree of emotional vulnerability and psychological fragility that we were never to see again. It's fairly apparent to me, that Post-Bond, Connery was attempting to slough off the skin of Ian Fleming's character once and for all, and his bravery as an actor here is formidable. His thinning hairline is, for the first time in his career I believe, exposed to the world for all to see and the charismatic sang-froid of Bond is nowhere to be seen beneath Johnson's moustache, Sheepskin jacket, hat and bilious tirades of blunt invective.

But there is far more to this film than just Connery's performance. The screenplay, brilliantly adapted for the screen from a stage-play by John Hopkins, remains to my mind the most disturbingly eloquent and subtly brilliant examination of a man succumbing to what we would now call "post-traumatic stress disorder" (and gaining a devastating insight into his own distasteful psychosexual predilections in the process?) that has ever been committed to film. It is all the more impressive because it is told in a decidedly abstract non-linear style in which the audience first observes the aftermath of the offence itself without context; then the context of the situation; and finally the devastatingly catastrophic interrogation that immediately precipitates the offence itself.

Lumet as a director perfectly captures the soullessness of England's then burgeoning 'satellite' new towns - vast, monolithic, semi-industrialized estates of Corbuserian office buildings, clone homes, motorways and underpasses which were constructed in the Home Counties in order to house the overflow population of London - using a drab pallet of rainy greys, caustic strip lighting, and shadow. No other film has ever rendered the experience of living in one of these towns so effectively; and I should know, as I actually grew up in the town in which this movie was filmed; my mother worked at "the school" (in reality a retirement home) at which Connery and his men stand vigil at the beginning of the film; the block of flats in which Connery lives with his wife were a stone's throw from our house (the building is called "Point Royal") and I whiled away many a happy hour as a child/teenager in the town library which doubled as the exterior of "the police station".

Lumet's use of the image of a light in the interrogation room as an aesthetic motif for the theme of insight that recurs throughout the film ("in this room you discover something like the truth about yourself") is inspired, and a bravura (and disturbing) sequence in which we are treated to a brief glimpse of the tortured memories that plague Johnson's mind as he drives home remains devastatingly effective.

"The Offence" is the kind of film that, for the most part, just doesn't get made any more by big budget studios that are more interested in pandering to the lowest common denominator in pursuit of big bucks than telling an original story. It's intelligent, erudite, understated, subtle and profoundly disturbing; and if you want to measure the degree of it's influence, you need only compare a scene in this film - in which Connery's wife (Vivien Merchant) grows to regret her demand that he "open up to her" when he proceeds to reel off a catalogue of the barbarity, violence and inhumanity that he has witnessed on the job - with a very similar one that appears in Michael Mann's excellent film, "Heat".

Finding out this movie was adapted from a stage play answered a lot of questions for me. The film feels very much like a play. It rarely moves from one room to the next, and the majority of the film feels like one long conversation. My wife, bored within the first few minutes, continually walked in and out of the room and she commented on how it felt like the movie was one never-ending scene, beings that she always seemed to see the same thing upon reentering the room.

I'm not saying that this is a huge issue, but there are times when the film can seem redundant because of that.

Sidney Lumet is an extraordinary director, I won't ever deny him that. I personally don't feel this is his best effort, and I found the film to be lacking in a few areas, but there is no denying that Lumet tries gallantly to make this work.

The film opens with the aftermath of a brutal attack. This is not the type of attack you'd expect though. It opens with Detective Sergeant Johnson brutally interrogating Kenneth Baxter, a man suspected of child molestation. After this opening sequence we are taken back to before the attack so that we can see what led up to Kenneth being taken into custody, and then it skips right over the interrogation to show Johnson adjusting after the attack. Only after we see his moral collapse do we get to see what all happened inside that room.

Personally I found that Connery anchored this movie, and without his presence the film falls flat. Thankfully he's in most of the film. I've always enjoyed Sean's work, but he's never truly been taken seriously as an actor. I found his Oscar winning performance in `The Untouchables' to be weak, and so I've always been slightly baffled that that still remains his ONLY nomination, when you consider his superb work, especially during the 70's. This performance in particular was stellar. He really captures the haunting realities of working in this field. He portrays his characters mental deterioration and emotional crumbling to perfection, especially in that final interrogation scene. I also enjoyed his severity in which he conveys his feelings to his wife. He really got the seething nature of his profession.

Aside from Connery (and a rather remarkably unsettling turn by Ian Bannen) though, I found this film to be a little stale. I don't know how to explain the feeling I got when the film ended. It didn't leave me with any real lasting connection. Sure, Connery was effecting and he really elevated the film, but in the end the film doesn't feel like anything remarkable at all. It just feels like a film, plain and simple. It's a decent way to pass the time. True, it could have been edited a little better. There are scenes that seem to drag on and there could have been a little more character development in areas, but overall I cannot say this is a waste of time.

Watch it for Connery, and expect a lot from him because he delivers; but don't expect this to be a film you'll want to watch over and over because it's simply not that film.

Three and a half stars. Well-acted thriller. Connery, who plays a disturbed policeman forced to face his demons, gives a brave performance, especially considering he could have spent the rest of his acting life making buckets of money playing 007 and nothing else. He stretches himself here and is given excellent support by the likes of Trevor Howard (who is a man, and does not play the wife as stated in an earlier review), Vivian Merchant (who does play Connery's wife) and especially Ian Bannen as the accused child molester. Lumet's direction occasionally borders on the murky (dark lighting, endless rain, mysterious flashbacks), but the actors come through. Worth seeing.