THE OFFENCE (1973)

While you don’t think of Sean Connery, even in his James Bond-busting roles, as a go-to actor for NYC-centric director Sidney Lumet, they actually worked together five times.*  Notably, sans toupeé in four of the five, including this police downer where Connery’s twenty-year vet can’t hold back once he starts interrogating Ian Bannen’s serial child molester.  Nothing’s been proved, but Connery ‘noses’ him out.  After so many cases, so much violence, so much time on horror after horror (brought back in subliminal edits), he’s just knows.  He also, tragically, belongs to them in a way, obsessed to the point of losing all control.  Structured, after an extended prologue finding the missing girl, as a series of power-duets between Connery and his superior (Peter Bowles), Connery and his unhappy/unsatisfying wife (Vivien Merchant), Connery and the police internal investigator (Trevor Howard), and finally Connery and the perp (in flashback).  The script feels designed as a theatrical play with the whole cast stepping up one-by-one to face Connery.  And that becomes a problem, something Lumet seems painfully aware of as he tries, without much success, to pull everyone back from clobbering the camera with over-emoting using Gerry Fisher’s grungy color scheme & smudgy lighting to contrast with some tricky camera effects.  (It was either that or have Connery make like Rod Steiger in THE PAWNBROKER/’64 and stab his hand on a desk receipt nail.  Yikes!)  Made fast and cheap, the film is quite an achievement in some ways, a technical/professional marvel at the 1 mill. price, but also brutally obvious.*  And it’s not the only Lumet/Connery film to feel that way.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  I kept writing THE OFFENSE instead of THE OFFENCE.  The ‘wrong’ spelling a better fit.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Brutally obvious, a perfect description of the first Connery/Lumet collaboration, THE HILL/’65.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-hill-1965.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *No doubt, we’ve got this backwards in that it was more likely Lumet was a ‘go-to’ director for Connery, certainly so here.