Blu-ray Review: The Offence

Imprint # 284

Distributor: Via Vision Entertainment (Imprint)

Release Date: December 27, 2023

 Region: Region Free

Length: 01:52:36

 Video: 1080P (MPEG-4, AVC)

Main Audio: 2.0 English Mono Linear PCM Audio

Subtitles: English HOH

Ratio: 1.66:1

Notes: This Blu-ray is available as part of the “Directed By… Sidney Lumet: Volume One (1964-1973)” boxed set. Kino Lorber also released a Blu-ray edition of this title in 2014.

“No film in Lumet’s canon is more uncomfortable to watch than his relentless The Offence (1973); yet none shows so strikingly how the director can confront the most controversial and horrifying themes without resorting to gratuitous violence or sensationalism.” —Frank R. Cunningham (Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision — Second Edition, 1991 / 2001)

The Offence is the third of five collaborations that Lumet would make with Sean Connery. They had worked beautifully together in both The Hill (1965) and The Anderson Tapes (1971), and this collaboration would result in what many film scholars consider the actor’s best performance. In her biography about Lumet, Maura Spiegel observed that the story about a burnt-out British police detective who finally snaps whilst interrogating a suspected child molester is essentially a “story of corruption at the heart of law enforcement” and that it “looks ahead to some of Sidney’s greatest films.”

Even so, Sean Connery was the driving force behind the production. The Offence is based on a play by John Hopkins entitled “This Story of Yours.” It achieved minor success when it was staged at London’s Royal Court in 1968, and the actor was so taken with it that he became determined to star in a screen adaptation. In fact, he had contacted Hopkins about adapting his play for the screen years before he was able to secure financing for the project. Connery would later note that “what Hopkins wrote remains word for word with not one thing changing from the original script,” but this is something more than an oversimplification because substantial changes were made. Some were a matter of opening up the action, and others were structural alterations.

It seems unlikely that the film could or would have ever been produced if it hadn’t been for Connery’s passion for the material. Luckily, he was in a unique position to bargain. United Artists were desperate to sign the actor for another Bond film. He had retired from the franchise after making You Only Live Twice (1967), and the subsequent Bond film — On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) — would star George Lazenby. When Lazenby announced that he didn’t intend to make any future Bond films, the suits at the studio began to feel that Connery was their only option for a follow-up (and many fans of the franchise agreed wholeheartedly).

The very fact that the studio wanted Connery more than he wanted the role gave the actor an enormous amount of bargaining power, and you better believe he used that power. He made it a condition of his contract that they would finance and release two films of his choice so long as their budgets were limited to a million dollars. This condition was largely born out of the fact that he wanted desperately to make The Offense, and this would be the first film made under that bargain (the second film never saw the light of day).

The deal worked out reasonably well for United Artists as well. As Kenneth Passingham noted in “Sean Connery: A Biography,” “Diamonds Are Forever had now broken every cinema attendance record everywhere it played, from Japan to Chicago, from Sweden to St Louis. It was a license to print money, even then racing away to a total gross of $100 million.” The actor hoped that its success would enhance the admittedly dubious commercial prospects of The Offense. Before the film even went into production, Connery was discussing the film in interviews with the press.

“I will be interested in how the public takes it… It’s painful . . . Some people may detest [my] character … The British have always been so anti-analysis in every sense of the word, but this film goes into analysis of why this detective became what he is.’” —Sean Connery (as quoted in “Sean Connery: A Biography,” Spring 1973 / 2011)

It wasn’t long after he had signed his lucrative contract that he set the wheels into motion for The Offense.

“He set up his own production company — Tantallon Films — to get the creative process working, and then United Artists had to put up the money. The deal also required that Tantallon receive 50 percent of any profits. … Sean was more enthused about the project than any other film in recent memory. He told a reporter, ‘This is the perfect vehicle for what I want to do from now on. The Bond films took forever to make and made any kind of artistic rhythm mood impossible. This film is being done so cheaply, there’s no chance we’ll be taken to the laundry on it — even though, because of the subject, there’s not much chance of an American TV sale.’

Connery was wrong on both counts. The film took eight years [or nine years according to many sources] to show a small profit, and it was seen on television in the United States many years later.

Connery surrounded himself with a talented group of professionals. He re-teamed with Sidney Lumet largely because he was impressed by the director’s no-nonsense approach to filming. Connery stated, ‘We worked so well together on The Hill and The Anderson Tapes. Sidney has a fine sense of tempo and pace. He knows how to develop ensemble playing as you can tell by films like Twelve Angry Men, and he gets into the spirit of a story with uncanny immediacy. … Best of all, there’s none of the eight or nine takes nonsense for him. You do that and everything becomes very leisurely, the days start to slip away, and before long you start to wonder why you’re being paid to get a suntan.’

…First-rate acting support was provided by Trevor Howard as the chief inspector and Ian Bannen (Connery’s nemesis in The Hill) as the suspect who precipitates a tragic fate for himself and Connery. Noted actress Vivien Merchant was cast as Sean’s long-suffering spouse in a largely loveless marriage…

…Filming commenced in [March and] April 1972 at Twickenham Studios following a rigorous ten-day rehearsal schedule designed to let the cast get ‘in synch’ with their roles and each other. ‘We couldn’t possibly shoot the film without heavy rehearsals,’ Connery admitted. ‘Every movement had a special meaning for each of the performers.’

Location work found the cast and crew in Bracknell, Berkshire, where Sean found time to sign autographs for the locals, especially children who recognized him as James Bond, despite a receding hairline, bushy mustache, and bulky sheepskin coat. Other locations in and around London were used, primarily for a sequence depicting a large-scale police manhunt.” —Lee Pfeiffer and Philip Lisa (The Films of Sean Connery, 1993)

Connery worked long and hard (up to 20 hours a day) in his role as a producer and was thrilled that he was able to complete the film under budget and ahead of schedule (saving the studio $80,000 dollars). He probably should have added a clause in his contract that any money saved on the production would go towards the marketing and distribution of the film, because United Artists didn’t spend much of their capitol on either. Apparently, they didn’t feel that it was worth blowing more money on a film that was too dark and too bleak to find an audience. They didn’t know what to do with it and ended up sitting on it for over a year before releasing it in the US. It eventually premiered a bit earlier on January 11, 1973, in London, but it would be May 11, 1973, before Americans could see the film — and even then, it wasn’t given a wide release. Christopher Bray would later write that “Audiences delighted by the return of their recalcitrant comic hero to the Bond fold stayed away in droves,” but this discounts the fact that there wasn’t much of a release. How can audiences see a film that isn’t given a proper release? Predictably, given the fact that the film only screened in a few arthouse theaters, the film’s box-office numbers were as depressing as the film’s dour plot.

The film was also mishandled in the UK. Instead of being screened at arthouse theaters, it was dropped into a handful of larger theaters without the benefit of a significant marketing campaign.

“A year or so after The Offence had been ushered into unwelcoming world, a prickly and defensive Connery was to be found arguing that the movie had been released in the wrong way. ‘Cries and Whispers, he said, returning to his love of Bergman, ‘played in London at the Curzon, which caters for a certain kind of audience. So, the film has a start — a foothold on its own kind of public … [for] The Offence . . . the Odeon Leicester Square . . . was just too big.’ If, Connery went on to say, you open a small picture in a small cinema, you get crowded houses — and these encourage more crowded houses in their turn. It’s a fair point and a logical argument, but it disregards the fact that, at least in May 1973, mere months after Diamonds Are Forever had finally come to the end of its near year-long cinema run, films starring Sean Connery simply couldn’t be conceived of as opening in small art-house cinemas. Films starring Sean Connery opened at the biggest movie palaces there were. Given the grandiloquent failure of The Offence, though, for how much longer would that be true?” —Christopher Bray (Sean Connery: A Biography, 2011)

As for whether The Offense was met with derision or enthusiastic praise from critics upon its skimpy release, it depends on which “expert” one believes. Film historians are too often colored by their own unbendable opinions. For example, Lee Pfeiffer and Philip Lisa — who appreciate the film despite its challenging subject matter — claim that the film received a mostly positive reception:

“British critic Marjorie Bilbow expressed the popular consensus best, noting, ‘When any two characters are locked in spoken combat, the film is both moving and intellectually stimulating.’ … New York’s Daily News concurred and referred to Connery’s performance as ‘superb.’ Longtime Playboy film critic Bruce Williamson recently commented that, had the film been given proper promotion, it would certainly have resulted in an Oscar nomination for Connery. Again, Sean had to suffer the indignity of having a superb performance appear in a film that went largely unseen. This remarkable example of ensemble acting could well be shown as a textbook example of acting perfection.” —Lee Pfeiffer and Philip Lisa (The Films of Sean Connery, 1993)

Vincent Canby’s review for the New York Times also lends support for this perspective (even if he clearly feels that it is a very good but imperfect film).

“Sidney Lumet’s new film, The Offence, takes place in a suburb of London, not an old suburb but one of those barren new suburbs still in the process of development, where lawns fade into scrubby fields that don’t give one a feeling of space as much as emptiness, of vacant lots awaiting overnight transformation into bleak, middle-income housing blocks. The time (probably winter) and the place perfectly reflect the unacknowledged despair contained in almost every frame of this harrowing story, which seems to be about the search for a man who’s been luring little schoolgirls into culverts and then raping them. ‘Seems’ is the proper word because, about halfway through, one becomes aware that the film is not about a manhunt.

Rather it is a psychological striptease, about a tough, hard-drinking, hard-headed detective. For some time before the start of the film, Detective Johnson (Sean Connery) has been cracking up, remembering (even if against his better will) the way that suicides have looked when he has found them, the way a murdered child’s arm dangled through the slats of a crib, the awkward position of a woman who had been tied to a bed and tortured to death. Other men put these things out of their minds. Johnson cherishes them.

As it progresses, The Offence, for all its elaborate setting of scene and for all its introduction of subsidiary characters (beautifully played by Trevor Howard and Vivien Merchant, among others), sort of gets smaller and smaller, instead of bigger. The entire film, it turns out, exists for a single sequence, a brutal station-house confrontation between the detective and his prime suspect (Ian Bannen), between a lower-class psychotic and a middle-class neurotic, between a closet sadist and an admitted masochist. In a sense, they are lovers, made for each other.

It’s highly theatrical — perhaps just a little too highly theatrical for the more or less realistic context — but it’s been staged by Lumet for maximum effect. The revelations explode predictably, like the ingredients of a 24-hour cold capsule, but the dramatic impact is real while one is watching it. Connery and Bannen are so fine, and the feelings prompted so intense, that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the sequence could stand on its own, as if it were a one-act play. Everything that has gone before seems to have been so much vamping for time. Some of the things that have gone before also tend to detract from this climax. Since it’s so clear to the audience that Detective Johnson has long since come apart, it’s difficult to understand why the men who work with him haven’t recognized the fact. That may be splitting hairs. The Offence has one big, carefully worked out, dramatic moment, which is more than most movies have these days.” —Vincent Canby (New York Times, May 12, 1973)

On the other side of the spectrum sits Christopher Bray, who announces that the critics “were uniformly harsh on what they saw as a pretentious, self-indulgent morass of gloom.” In actuality, this mirrors his own thoughts about the film. However, there were certainly plenty of reviews to support his claim (if one were to ignore those that didn’t). A staff writer for Variety, for example, seemed to be writing directly to Vincent Canby. “There’s a powerful confrontation of authority and accused between police sergeant Sean Connery and suspected child molester” the review reported. “A brilliant scene, however, does not in itself make for a brilliant overall feature.”

Richard Schickel agreed (although he cites other scenes as also being great).

“Whenever Sidney Lumet and Sean Connery get together, the subject seems to be sadomasochism. It was the major theme of The Hill, a subtext of The Anderson Tapes, and now, in The Offence, it is once again a central preoccupation.

In a raw new London suburb, the police are engaged in an all-out man hunt for a sex pervert who molests children. Connery is a detective who brings a peculiar passion to the pursuit. When a prime suspect (Ian Bannen) is captured, Connery takes over the interrogation and, in the process, beats the man to death. This much we know almost from the beginning, so the film is less of a who-dun-it than a why-dun-it. Unfortunately, however, John Hopkins’ script almost immediately starts dropping broad hints on this matter too…

…Lumet’s direction strives to give to material that is neither edifying nor suspenseful a fake profundity, stretching it to unconscionable lengths. But at least he allows his actors plenty of room to roam. Connery’s confession to his wife (Vivien Merchant) of his long struggle to save his sanity, and her recognition of unconscious complicity with the forces that are driving him crazy, is a gripping scene, full of what might be termed home truth. Trevor Howard, as a fellow officer investigating Connery, plays an almost equally strong scene as he tries to get Connery’s confession into the public record. The climactic moments are first-rate.

The misfortune of the film is that what Connery is shocked to learn about himself is something any sensible person will have long since guessed. That is the trouble with sadomasochism as a subject. It is easy to catch its surface symptoms, but its roots are too deeply buried to be dug up and exposed by any but the most skilled and sensitive artists. Lumet is not one of them. Despite good acting, audiences will want to avoid The Offence.” —Richard Schickel (Cinema: Offencive, Time, June 04, 1973)

Christopher Hudson also believed that the film was “worth going some way to avoid.”

“The story is unrelievedly gloomy and malodorous. The dialogue is jointed with Pinteresque fits and starts which Connery, as the detective, completely fails to handle. But the fault isn’t all his: even Vivien Merchant, a gifted actress, can make little of her miserable part. Lumet’s feat of detaching our sympathy completely from all the characters except possibly the child rapist, dissipates the effect of any message he might have for us. His best films have relied upon fine acting from two people in a knife-edge confrontation, backed up with a solid, craftsman like script. Given stylized dialogue and a mediocre performance from Connery, he is left appearing to parody his own technique.” —Christopher Hudson (The Spectator, January 20, 1973)

The truth — or at least the truth based on the various reviews that can be found online — is that the critical reception was more mixed. It currently has a 71% on Rotten Tomatoes. However, there are many reviews that aren’t taken into account to achieve this score, and it includes more recent assessments of the film in addition to those that were written at the time of the film’s release.

Even so, Bray’s claim that “were uniformly harsh on what they saw as a pretentious, self-indulgent morass of gloom” isn’t even remotely accurate. It merely reflects his own personal feelings about the film. In fact, his chapter about the film in “Sean Connery: A Biography” reads more like a Pauline Kael diatribe than a biographical account of the film’s production.

“While there is much to admire about The Offence, there isn’t much to like about it… The trouble is that despite the tragic swagger of Connery’s performance, its artfully artless grandeur. The movie itself is a trumped-up hunk of pretension. The director, chosen by Connery himself, is his old friend Sidney Lumet — a man drawn an instinctively to the liberal and the decent, but drawn, too, to what Andrew Sarris has called ‘strained seriousness.’

The opening moments of The Offence are signal here, as we hear some Moogy, woodwindy noises on the soundtrack, and see, through a foggy halation-effect lens, a slo-mo shot of — well, of what? Heaven? Hell? The murky chaos of Johnson’s mind? Elsewhere, Lumet serves up whiteouts and blackouts, cloudy, occluded repetitions of key (and not so key) moments and sundry other visual intrusions. The effect, magnified by the movie’s main location — massive interrogation room empty save for a stack of plastic chairs and loomed over by a mammoth circular light fitting that comes straight out of Ken Adam — is of the stage set for some radical theatre workshop. All these silences, these repetitions, these non-sequiturs, these doomy visuals and grimy soundscapes — they all make sense (which is not the same thing as saying that they work) within the confines of the Dadaist abstractions of post-sixties theatre. But they make no sense amid the rough and tumble of mainstream moviemaking.

Nor does Hopkins’s dialogue help. While Connery gives a physically commanding performance as a man driven to the brink of lunacy by the stresses of his job and the strains of a failing marriage, his Sergeant Johnson has a symbolist eloquence that sits uneasily on his naturalist shoulders. Sean Connery has one of the most distinctive voices in the history of movies, but no film actor could be expected to get away with munching his way through Hopkins’s random poetic clusters: ‘bodies . . . stinking, swollen, black, putrid, the smell of death … chequered, splintered bones. . . filthy, swarming, slimy maggots in my mind, eating in my mind.’ Done properly, such Rimbaud-esque rhetoric can — one doesn’t say will — work on the stage. But the movie screen thrives on the concrete and the real, and does not happily play host to literary afflatus. An actor as attuned to somatic effects as Connery ought to perhaps have wondered whether all the words he was having to fight his way through were necessary. The kind of writing he really believed in, he would say some years after The Offence, was ‘writing where it’s not what’s said that matters, but what’s revealed.’ What revelations Connery makes in The Offence, though, are made in spite of Hopkins’s script, and not because of it.

We should be careful, though, not to put the blame for all The Offence’s failings on its writer and director. While its star has subsequently complained about Lumet’s having ‘gone a bit European on us,’ the movie we have sounds like nothing so much as that Connery-directed production of ‘I’ve Seen You Cut Lemons’ of three years earlier. Moreover, Connery had not hitherto been known for being down on those Europeans. Asked not long after the release of The Offence who his favorite moviemaker was, Connery said Ingmar Bergman. There is no reason to disbelieve him — and what a fine knight Connery would have made in an English-language version of The Seventh Seal — though there is reason to wonder whether Connery’s fondness for Bergman might not consist largely in a belief that seriousness is the same thing as significance. Whether encouraged by Lumet’s own pretensions or by his own autodidactic belief that importance inheres only in works about putatively important issues, Connery seems unable to understand that any performance, any movie, is susceptible of significance. What counts is not content, but treatment — which does not mean that the treatment need be clever or fussy.” —Christopher Bray (Sean Connery: A Biography, 2011)

Of course, Bray reserved some space to say a few positive words about Connery’s performance. In fact, he maintained throughout his book that the film was “the best work Connery has ever done on the big screen.”

“The key thing to be said about the movie is that Connery is magnificent in it. The Offence is the first picture in Connery’s career as a star in which we never get to see him strip off and show off his fabulous physique. Yet Gerry Fisher’s camera, kept cunningly low whenever Connery is in [the] shot, is the first to really capture the sheer size of the man. Frame after frame of the movie is composed so that Connery’s DS Johnson looms in the foreground while — in what, thanks to Fisher’s wide-angle lens, seems like the distant background — his colleagues look timidly and minutely on.

More than that, though, Connery’s Johnson is on every level a big performance. Never before — and rarely since — has Connery been called on to make such a display of histrionics. Writhing his way around John W. Clark’s spare set like a bear in a net, he gives us not just a vision of a man possessed but an evocation of what a man who is no longer really a man looks like. Throughout the picture Connery’s hands seem to have a life of their own, wandering hither and thither, their putative owner appearing powerless to make them do as he pleases. For all its flaws, one cannot watch The Offence without rueing the fact that Connery has never actually got round to giving us his Macbeth.” —Christopher Bray (Sean Connery: A Biography, 2011)

The main trouble in Bray’s mind is that Connery was simply let down by Lumet’s “jumped-up aesthetics” — which is untrue and unfair to Lumet. If a person has trouble with the film, it is very likely that the root cause is that the subject isn’t to their liking or that the writing isn’t to their liking. Frankly, it all comes down to the fact that it is a “challenging” and “unpleasant” film, and most viewers don’t like to be challenged in quite this manner when watching a movie.

The Presentation:

5 of 5 Stars

Via Vision Entertainment protects the disc in a clear Blu-ray case with a dual sided insert sleeve that features artwork that is essentially a slight alteration of the film’s original one sheet design. The primary difference here is that the title has moved up slightly and is given more prominence with a slightly larger font size. Meanwhile, the credits at the bottom and the white negative space at the top of the original poster have been cropped. They have also omitted the tagline at the top left corner that once read: “After 20 years, what Detective-Sergeant Johnson has seen and done is destroying him.” The result is a cleaner image despite the cropping, and it makes for a very nice cover image. The interior includes a production still from one of the film’s scenes. This is essentially the same kind of case that Arrow Video uses for their releases (which is a good thing).

All of the movies included in the “Directed By… Sidney Lumet: Volume One (1964-1973)” collection fit into a very sturdy box that is incredibly attractive. Of course, those who wish to own the boxed set will need to act fast because this is a Limited Edition (only 1500 copies exist).

It is worth noting that the rating label is on the plastic wrapping and not on the actual box (nor is it on any of the individual insert sleeves for the films in this collection), so it does not mar the packaging in any way.

The disc’s static menu features attractive film related artwork and is intuitive to navigate.

Picture Quality:

4 of 5 Stars

This is another mystery transfer that was taken from a 2K scan of… we do not know exactly. It is likely an older scan that would likely benefit from a bit of tender loving care. However, such care isn’t usually afforded to films that failed at the box office and never really earned much of a following. Lumet fans are very lucky that the film is available on the format and that it looks as good as it does here. The print has stood up to the ravages of time rather admirably, and there are only a few instances of age-related anomalies (none of which distract the viewer). There’s some decent fine detail on display (even if we can’t say that it is impressive), and there aren’t any significant compression or noise related issues that stand out. Contrast could have been handled a bit better as there are occasional instances of minor crushing, but this is also not obvious to the point of distraction.

Sound Quality:

4 of 5 Stars

Purists rejoice. The 2.0 Mono LPCM Audio is yet another solid representation of the film’s original audio mix. All elements seem reasonably well prioritized.

Special Features:

5 of 5 Stars

Feature Length Audio Commentary by Lee Pfeiffer, Tony Latino, & Paul Scrabo

Lee Pfeiffer, Tony Latino, & Paul Scrabo track is interesting enough. Even so, after hearing Howard Berger’s informative track for Child’s Play, it is difficult not to wish that he had joined Lee Pfeiffer for this track instead of Latino and Scrabo. The interplay between the three participants keep the listener engaged, but their observations about the film don’t give the listener nearly as much food for thought as one might hope. What’s more, one doesn’t come out of it knowing much more about the film’s production. Pfeiffer does offer some very nice Sean Connery related information and some other tidbits about the film that make listening worthwhile.

Sidney Lumet: Childhood Elegy — (57:12)

Oddly, Howard Berger’s video essay isn’t as “edutaining” as his commentary track for Child’s Play, but there is enough to recommend watching it at least once.

Interview with Michael Stevenson — (07:49)

Michael Stevenson served as the film’s second assistant director, and he looks back on the production in this much too brief interview.

Interview with Harrison Birtwistle — (14:01)

Harrison Birtwistle composed the film’s unusual score (which is more of a sonic carpeting for various scenes than a traditional music score). He discusses his approach to creating this unusual element in the film. Interestingly, this was the only film that he ever scored.

Interview with Christopher Morahan — (15:46)

Christopher Morahan offers one of the disc’s most interesting interviews. Morahan was the director of the original stage production (although, he also discusses a few of his other projects as well).

Interview with Chris Burke — (12:50)

Chris Burke served as the assistant art director, and his memories about the film’s production are also interesting.

Interview with Evangeline Harrison — (06:29)

Evangeline Harrison worked as the film’s costume designer and shares a few amusing anecdotes here.

Interview with Simon Kaye — (06:20)

Simon Kaye served as the production’s sound mixer, and his interview tends to cover a few of the film’s sound challenges and how they were solved.

Theatrical Trailer — (02:07)

As always, we are happy that they have included the original theatrical trailer (even if it isn’t a particularly effective one).

Final Words:

The Offense is the perfect example of what it wants to be, so it is a creative success despite its failure to make a profit for nine years. It’s a terrific film that simply doesn’t hold much appeal for most of the population. Many will feel that it simply does its job too well. However, those who can appreciate a dark and “unpleasant” film that doesn’t belong to the horror genre might want to check this one out. It is easily one of Sean Connery’s best performances.

Note: While we were provided with a screener for review purposes, this had no bearing on our review process. We do not feel under any obligation to hand out positive reviews.