Forgotten Films: The Offence

Possibly the most relentlessly depressing film I've ever seen.  And that's a recommendation.  The Offence was Sean Connery's first film after his second, very brief, stint as James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever.  Indeed, the film was part of the deal Connery had made with United Artists to play 007 one last time, (1983's unofficial Bond outing Never Say Never Again notwithstanding), which included not just a million dollar fee, but also the stipulation that the studio would back two pictures of Connery's own choosing.  The Offence was the first of these.  And also the last.  Despite the presence of Connery, a great supporting cast of British character actors including Ian Bannen, Vivien Merchant and Trevor Howard, and top US director Sidney Lumet, (who had previously directed Connery in The Hill and The Anderson Tapes), the film was a box office disaster, resulting in United Artists pulling out of the deal.  In retrospect, it isn't difficult to see why the film flopped: in 1972 audiences simply didn't want to see Connery as a middle-aged police detective with a receding hairline, investigating a series of sexual assaults on school girls and so brutalised by his work that he finally snaps and beats a suspect to death in the course of an interrogation.  Grim stuff by today's standards, let alone in 1972.  The fact is that cinema goers back then wanted to see Connery as James Bond in a piece of glossy escapism.

Seen now, the film represents not just a gripping character study of a man at the end of his tether, but also a fascinating snapshot of an era.   Filmed in Bracknell, the quintessential British post war 'New Town', Lumet brings an outsider's eye to the town's tower blocks, housing estates, featureless roads and shopping centre (all glass and walkways), transforming it into a bleak urban wilderness.  Everything seems half-completed, a work-in-progress in brick and concrete.  The police station, where much of the action takes place, is particularly well realised, apparently composed of endless brick corridors and windowless rooms full of stacked up chairs and disused office equipment.  The actual working spaces used by the policemen are featureless, cramped and neon lit.  The few rooms with windows look, not outward to the community the station supposedly serves, but rather into a central well, filled with building equipment.  Not surprisingly, such a hostile environment, both inside and outside, serves to dehumanise and brutalise the film's main characters.

Central to the film is Connery's portrayal of veteran CID man Detective Sergeant Johnson, a tough and uncompromising cop with a reputation for always getting results, particularly when it comes to extracting confessions from suspects in the interrogation room.  This time, however, e finds the tables turned by Ian Bannen's Kenneth Baxter, who has been arrested on suspicion of committing the latest attack.  With no real evidence against him and no witness identification, Baxter is on the verge of being released when Johnson engages in an unauthorised, off-the-record, interrogation, eventually resorting to violence when verbal assaults fail.  Rather than breaking Baxter, the interrogation results in the suspect forcing Johnson to call into question his own motivation for investigating sex crimes.  Forced to confront the possibility that the reason he has been so successful in getting into the minds of suspects in such cases might be because he himself harbours some of the same sexual proclivities, Johnson finally breaks and administers a fatal beating to Baxter.  A powerful performance from Connery, Johnson's character is fleshed out through two sequences following the incident.  Driving home after being suspended, he flashes back over a montage of the incredibly depressing cases, including rape, murder, child abuse and suicide, that he has investigated during his twenty years on the force.  A deeply disturbing sequence, made all the more so by Harrison Birtwhistle's electronic soundscape/score which accompanies it, (and helps give the entire film its pervading sense of  coldness and alienation). 

This is followed by a scene at his typically generic flat, centred around a series of bitter exchanges with his wife (Vivien Merchant), which reveal the emptiness and abject failure of his personal life, sacrificed for the career which he has just destroyed. This is mercifully interrupted by the arrival of his colleagues with the news that Baxter has died and that he must return to the station.  A final blow to Johnson's self-image is administered during an interview with Trevor Howard's ultimately indifferent Detective Superintendent, who calls into question the 'success' of his career, questioning why, if Johnson is so good a police officer, he hasn't risen above the rank of sergeant in twenty years service.   An incredibly bleak and disturbing film, with no neat resolutions or happy endings, The Offence stands as an unjustly neglected piece of  1970s British cinema, portraying aspects of the UK - new towns, police brutality, sex crimes - rarely touched in mainstream films of the period.  Or after, indeed - let's not forget that after the British film industry's collapse in the later seventies, UK film increasingly became synonymous with those English Heritage costume dramas portraying a nice safe Britain of yesteryear where everybody knew their place.  I much prefer Bracknell in the 1970s.