The Offence

Year : 1973
Category: Crime, action, drama
Director : Sidney Lumet
Cast : Sean Connery, Trevor Howard, Vivien Merchant, Ian Bannan, John Hallam, Peter Bowles, Hilda Fenemore, Howard Goorney, Maxine Gordon, Rhoda lewis, Cynthia Lund, Richard Moore, Ronald Radd, Anthony Sagar

Of his non-James Bond movies, “The Offence” is a popular one in which Sean was a Detective Sergeant Officer named Johnson. The audience no doubt liked him as usual because of his ever charming sophistic suave and the role fitted him just perfectly. In this film by Sidney Lumet the British Police has been delineated as an excruciating torturer.

The Story
Detective Sergeant Johnson has been working for the British Police for a ling time of about 20 years and throughout this whole journey he had to handle all the brutal cases but has been quite tolerant to check all his choler and hostility. A suspect named Baxter (Ian Bannan) has been spotted to be linked with all the rape cases and assailments on the young girls.

During the encounter things just get on to his nerves and Johnson beats the suspect so viciously that in the whole process he develops a self-realization that his state of mind is as good as that of the criminals who committed the crime that actually agitated him.

The Author
John Hopkins, the writer an inciting and vexing film like “The Offence” once said it right that to know the depraved human nature one must first peep into one’s own self. And this very philosophical belief was rightly proved y the movie itself.

Performance Is Just Superb!
Sean here portrays the role of a British Police who has come across lots of inequity of human nature. The inexorable barbarous revulsions of this very job of his has robbed him of human correctitude and made him a pervert in his sub-conscious state. These very envision of his own self retracts him off from all his loved ones, even his wife.

The cop somehow fails to enounce this anguish and baffled feel of his, which finally leads him to a barren island with nobody else to empathize him genuinely than that suspected child molester whom he was interrogating! This growing dependency of Sean on Ian Bannan, who played the role of a suspected child rapist with a subtle sapidity, led him to purgation and demise.

A Few Words To End
We must admit that Sydney Lumet’s work on the mental agony of a man who gets perverted by constantly dealing with all the maletic criminal deeds throughout his life has been proved to be a rather citable example of the same. The film is no doubt a masterpiece with a frame structure of human debility with a soul-searching background.