Lumet brought this vibe to England, adapting John Hopkins's play, which like so many Lumet films is constituted around a closed space with two or more characters tearing at each others' figurative throats and preparing for their own skulls to explode from the tension and angst. Connery is Johnson, a Sergeant Detective in the small-city police force up in arms moment amidst a rash of child abductions and killings. Johnson starts out seeming merely restless and cynical in the classic avenging-angel psycho-cop manner popularized by Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan - he impatiently sees law and procedure as obstacles, and all suspects as perpetrators waiting to have the truth beat out of them. The hilly, gray, rainy countryside is charged with apprehension - but despite the vigilant presence of police and parents at the grade school's dismissal, one girl walks home alone, and is glimpsed by an uncertain passerby being guided by a man into a local walkway tunnel. Before long she's declared disappeared, and the force scours the area into the night. Johnson eventually finds her, bruised and raped and terrified, and not long thereafter a stumbling man with scratches on his face (Ian Bannen) is picked up by bobbies and brought in for questioning.
The Offence drops a rain shower of hints about Johnson - especially as he rescues the girl in the woods, where he seems to know where she's lying, seems to feel ambivalent about touching her, seems to have a flash of fear in his eyes when he sees the cops' flashlights approaching. Is Johnson the perp? Our antennae are up, because we know from the opening-credits flash-forward - a dreamy, spooky slo-mo survey of the police station in chaos, ending up in an examination room where Johnson has left more than one body heaped on the floor - that things will not turn out well. From there, the timeline gets jumbled, between three major confrontations: Johnson's closed-room face-off with Bannen's enigmatic and diffident stranger, a pas de deux that we return to again and again; Johnson's verbal battle with his solicitous but exhausted wife (the rather amazing Vivian Merchant), after he gets suspended for police brutality; and an interrogation with internal-affairs chief Trevor Howard, once we learn that Johnson has succeeded in beating the arrested man to death, under circumstances that only slowly become revealed.
Each duet is a hair-pulling psychological striptease, but what happened in that interrogation room is the crux of the matter, and it has everything to do with Johnson's own inner condition, which is to say, he's a psychopath, haunted by crime scene memories and racked with as much loathing for himself as for the killer - who may or may not be Bannen. Connery comes into his own here as an actor. After years of Bond and brawny genre sagas, from gunfighter in Shalako (1968) to arctic explorer Roald Amundsen in The Red Tent (1969) to coal-miner terrorist in The Molly Maguires (1970) to heist master in The Anderson Tapes (1971), Connery steps into the muckier swamp of psychosexual madness here, and his Johnson is a bull-headed, working-class macho paradigm in full meltdown. The scene with Merchant's wary, bruised wife may be his career best at this stage in his filmography - a marital knife-fight of miscommunication as dismaying as it is convincing.
As you might suppose, The Offence is handicapped by its essential material - like all plays-into-films, no matter how "opened out," the drama has an insular, padded-room quality to it that not only curtails the scenario's dramatic potential (you know we're staying in these rooms) but also often grows intense to the point of being surreal and/or unbelievable. How bewitching and seductive the film's first half-hour is, roaming the wet Berkshire neighborhoods and roadsides in Lumet's long shots, engaging with landscape and atmosphere in ways no play can manage. Still, given the genre's restrictions, the movie dishes out a hot banquet of juicy histrionics, getting spittle-close to pedophiliac self-hatred in ways that run crazily close to Peter Lorre's self-immolating child killer in Fritz Lang's seminal M (1931).
By Michael Atkinson
