This has a most languorous and off putting pre-credit sequence that had me half closing my eyes even before the film proper had begun. And even then when it is clear there has been the most appalling over reaction by Sean Connery's character as police interrogator, that this is to be dealt with in flashback, had be seriously concerned that I was not likely to make it to the end. Things pick up, however, the script becomes more assured towards the end and Ian Bannen and Sean Connery give the performances of their lives. Paedophelia is a difficult enough subject to deal with on screen and here where the main investigator has his own demons in this area, it is even more fraught. Brave John Hopkins original play and Lumet does a decent enough job bringing it to the screen though it was presumably lack of adequate budget that means it tends to have that TV cop show look a lot of the time. Harrison Birtwistle an unusual choice for composer and he certainly turns out a quirky if at times discordant score.

I want the 2 hours of my life back :( This is a pretentious load of crap. I don't understand what all the other reviewers are talking about. Connery's "performance" consists of chewing on the furniture for most of the movie. The film makers seem to think that under-exposed film, bad lighting, and worse sound will make the movie seem deeper. The characters and motivations are totally contrived. Yuck.The film comes in two halves. The first half is a very boring and slow "who done it?" cops and robbers affair, trying to find who attacked some little children. But it is incredibly, painfully slow and tedious. It is not helped at all by the acid-trip habit of inserting random imagery of flowers into scenes that were otherwise intended to be tense.The second half is one of those pretentious dialogs where two characters talk at each other for an hour. This is the scene other reviewers rave about, and I totally don't get it. It is *awful*; Connery and the other guy are both horribly over-acting, and don't look like realistic characters at all. They look like awkward puppets acting out the tedious message of the film makers.Again, yuck. And I even *like* Connery. But this is almost as bad as Zardoz. Almost, because nothing could really be as bad as Zardoz :)

The Offence is based on a play, and it shows. Very few locations- interrogation room, police quarters, a few outdoor scenes, Johnson's home- are punctuated by a whole lot of men (and one woman in a scene) talking in rooms. This doesn't dissuade a director like Sidney Lumet, however, who feeds the fire that actors crave, which is freedom to take some risky material anywhere it needs to go. In this case it's about a detective who is on a child murder/raper case who in the midst of the manhunt finds in one night a girl who survived in the woods, and a suspect who is picked up as a vagrant in the middle of the night. He gets somehow alone in an interrogation room with the man (Ian Bannen) and, in what seems like no time at all, the man is dead and Johnson (Connery) is half-shocked and half-not-surprised at himself for what he's done.The rest of the film is introspective self-inquiry, and a closer with a double-back (perhaps influenced a little by Rashomon though not entirely) on what really happened in that interrogation room. While Lumet implements some "subliminal" cuts into some scenes to show in Johnson's mind how the "pictures" he sees his head, the thoughts and memories of crimes and victims and blood and bodies over a twenty year career as a cop, they don't really act as being effective for much longer past the first scene (a bring white ring on the screen kind of wears itself out after the eerie opening scene too). It's a shame since Lumet previously used the technique in The Pawnbroker and this time just didn't connect with it. It is, sad to say, dated and not totally necessary to get inside of Connery's headspace (not that the image of the woman dead and tied up to the bed won't stick with me for a while either, I should admit).But it's all in Connery's expressions, his voice trembling and devastated by what he's done, while also in the knowledge that there was no other way he could get around it. What's revealing about Johnson through the course of the film, and how Connery phenomenally plays it, is not how monstrous he is but how recognizable he is. He's a mad policeman, sure, but how he got that way is what counts. He was 'normal' once, or just a decent cop, and somehow after years of exposure he couldn't put it aside or live two lives as Trevor Howard's character suggests. Instead he internalized it, and it all boiled up to a head with his interrogation of Baxter. When Lumet finally gets to this very long scene, which closes out the film, its so epic it may make one reevaluate the interrogation scene of Batman versus the Joker in the Dark Knight. It's one of those actor set-pieces that scorches the floor dramatically. Sadly, the rest of the film doesn't quite hold up to the same intensity (though Connery does).

In his 20 years as a policeman Detective-Sergeant Johnson has seen a lot.His memories haunt him, he sees pictures in his head and he is falling into mental breakdown.And now he's investigating a case with a child molester attacking young girls.They find a man, Kenneth Baxter, who could be him.Johnson gets in the room with him.After interrogating him, he beats him up and he dies later in the hospital.The Offence from 1972 is a less known work from Sidney Lumet.I can't see why.This his British film certainly should deserve more credit.Sean Connery gives one of his strongest performances as Johnson.Those moments where he interrogates Baxter and does him violence, or with his wife sharing a bad memory as a cop...in those moments Connery does a very good job leading us into Johnson's psyche.Vivient Merchant does a very good job playing his unloving wife Maureen.Ian Bannen is Kenneth Baxter and he's great in his role.The brilliant English actor Trevor Howard portrays Detective Superintendent Cartwright, who interrogates Johnson.Peter Bowles plays Detective Inspector Cameron.The Offence gives a truly fascinating look at the human psyche.If you find this film, don't miss it.