Watch The Offence For Free

Very best movie i ever watch

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I saw this film on its premiere engagement at the Odeon Leicester Square.My notes indicate that I found the film overlong and repetative.I have just watched it for the first time since then and have to say that I still hold to those opinions.The climactic scene between Connery and Howard just seems to be a shouting match.A rather unpleasant film.

Sean Connery is a British police lieutenant with a major chip on his shoulder. After 20 years of working one sordid crime after another, he's beyond burnt out, he's a serious cup of coffee waiting to spill...and he does...during the interrogation of suspected child rapist Ian Bannen. Sidney Lumet directed this stagy production that gives Connery one of his best and least likely roles; he's a bad good guy. It's a great performance in a highly unheralded film. Connery's anger is palpable and the first-rate supporting cast includes Trevor Howard and Vivien Merchent (as Connery's exhausted wife). The fact that the movie is not particularly cinematic does not dull its power. The script is by John Hopkins, adapting his play "The Story of Yours."

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.