The Offence is Sean Connery's best performance in a major motion picture, the problem though is that the film bombed and was rarely seen in the cinema, probably due to the material content of this very dark and dramatically compelling story.
Connery plays Sargeant Johnson, a twenty year veteran hard boiled detective who is investigating the disappearance of a schoolgirl, snatched by a serial child molester that the local police have been trying to capture for some time.
The schoolgirl is later found by Johnson in the woods, while out on a search patrol with uniformed officers, there's nothing brutal or gory about him finding her but she is caked in mud and her shirt is torn, suggesting rape, which is brutally harrowing in itself.
The way Johnson tracks the victim in the woods depicts his knack for (thinking)? the way the mysterious molester would, partly hinting that policeman and criminal have the same instincts.
The best scenes in the film are the interrogation between Johnson and Kenneth Baxter, brilliantly played by the late Ian Bannen.
Baxter is brought in as a suspect, having been found wandering around the town at the dead of night in a daze, covered in mud with scratches on his face, the film cleverly has Johnson start off the interrogation tough and cunning, cutting between other police characters duties in other parts of the station, then going back to the interrogation where Johnson brutally beats Baxter to death in a rage.
After a brilliant enquiry scene between Connery's character and Trevor Howard's superintendent Cartwright, we go back to the Interrogation between Johnson and Baxter, and realise that we were seeing only snippets of that conversation halfway through the film, we discover to our shock that Johnson's mentality and state of mind are as fragile and twisted as Baxter's, a result of twenty years of murders, rapes, robberies, suicides, vehicle road accidents and cases likes this, turning it in his mind again and again until it becomes a blur, and finds HE is just as capable of murder and inhuman behaviour as the suspect he is interrogating.
Grim and compelling, this is one of the darkest and disturbing films your ever likely to see, and anyone who says that Sean Connery can't act, then they should see this film immediately.
An underrated classic.
Connery plays Sargeant Johnson, a twenty year veteran hard boiled detective who is investigating the disappearance of a schoolgirl, snatched by a serial child molester that the local police have been trying to capture for some time.
The schoolgirl is later found by Johnson in the woods, while out on a search patrol with uniformed officers, there's nothing brutal or gory about him finding her but she is caked in mud and her shirt is torn, suggesting rape, which is brutally harrowing in itself.
The way Johnson tracks the victim in the woods depicts his knack for (thinking)? the way the mysterious molester would, partly hinting that policeman and criminal have the same instincts.
The best scenes in the film are the interrogation between Johnson and Kenneth Baxter, brilliantly played by the late Ian Bannen.
Baxter is brought in as a suspect, having been found wandering around the town at the dead of night in a daze, covered in mud with scratches on his face, the film cleverly has Johnson start off the interrogation tough and cunning, cutting between other police characters duties in other parts of the station, then going back to the interrogation where Johnson brutally beats Baxter to death in a rage.
After a brilliant enquiry scene between Connery's character and Trevor Howard's superintendent Cartwright, we go back to the Interrogation between Johnson and Baxter, and realise that we were seeing only snippets of that conversation halfway through the film, we discover to our shock that Johnson's mentality and state of mind are as fragile and twisted as Baxter's, a result of twenty years of murders, rapes, robberies, suicides, vehicle road accidents and cases likes this, turning it in his mind again and again until it becomes a blur, and finds HE is just as capable of murder and inhuman behaviour as the suspect he is interrogating.
Grim and compelling, this is one of the darkest and disturbing films your ever likely to see, and anyone who says that Sean Connery can't act, then they should see this film immediately.
An underrated classic.