“The Offence” Directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Sean Connery, Ian Bannen, Trevor Howard, 1973
Spoiler alert – this review presumes you have already seen the film, another of Sidney Lumet’s good-cop/bad-cop-in-one-person movies.
A schoolgirl is raped, and the British police soon bring in a suspect. When the first officer proves ineffective – mainly because he is too respectful of the suspect’s rights – detective sergeant Johnson (Connery) takes over the interrogation. The suspected pedophile Baxter is played by Ian Bannen (“Jim Prideaux” in “Tinker Tailor”). Johnson loathes Baxter – not just because of what he does to little girls, but because he holds up a mirror to himself. To break him, he relies on instinct and long experience more than evidence. He has one vulnerability, though: He fears being understood – and then laughed at – more than he worries he might be wrong.
Watching this movie again, I noticed lots of hand gestures, with people reaching out. Plenty of grasping but little touching. Both Johnson and Baxter hate to be touched, but don’t mind placing their hands on others. And more. It’s strongly implied that if the suspect is guilty of committing “The Offence,” (those scratches on his forehead are fresh) so is the copper, at least potentially. A man haunted by the horrible crimes he has seen over his career, unable to drown them no matter how much he drinks, his only release is to inflict punishment on others. As a damaged soul fighting against inner demons that threaten to take him over, he can all too easily – despite his horror – put himself in the other man’s shoes.
On repeated viewing I also noticed a little detail like the position of the door handle in the interrogation room when Johnson first confronts Baxter. Lumet shoots the scene in such a way as to position the handle shining brightly in the shadow right where Johnson’s (shall we say) “Johnson” would be located. This is one bent – or twisted – copper.
After beating Baxter, Johnson is sent home. First he is so disoriented he tries to enter the wrong apartment. Once inside the right one, he refuses to let himself be comforted by his long-suffering wife. His profession has helped bring out his inner sadism, and at home he feels fewer restraints. She is the only person he touches for more than a second, when he grasps her by the chin (the same way he had earlier grasped Baxter) and tells her his lurid, nightmarish story of finding a dead child. The story is so graphic it makes her throw up, which one suspects was his intent all along. If she cannot help him, at least he can have the satisfaction of making her feel what he suffers.
They live in an apartment that seems claustrophobic – until the final shot of this sequence, when we see her standing on the balcony as he is taken away, one could almost think it has no windows. The only time we catch a glimpse of any window before then is when the police ring the doorbell to tell him Baxter has died of the beating and he has to return to the station. He leaves without saying goodbye to his wife.
After Baxter dies but before we know the whole story, Johnson is taken back to the station for interrogation. Things start to look up briefly when Trevor Howard makes his entrance as Detective Superintendent Cartwright. At last, we think, someone Johnson could turn to for help – much as de Niro turns to Peter Boyle in “Taxi Driver.” Alas, the result is much the same; the only advice the Det. Super. can offer is, “You’ve got to accept you’re two people” and “Leave it at work.” Along the way he makes the point that Johnson has spent his entire career as Detective Sergeant – never even making Detective Lieutenant. In the end, Cartwright is no more effective in offering therapy than the wife, and his final recommendation is an exasperated “Help yourself!”
So when, in the great confrontation scene (an extended flashback), Baxter tells Johnson, “Nothing I have done can be half as bad as the thoughts in your head,” he’s speaking the truth, or something like the truth. The copper says he can read the perp, but in fact it is Baxter who sees Johnson for who and what he is, and this Johnson cannot accept. His strategy is to make Baxter feel what his victims felt, without fully realizing that this puts him in Baxter’s shoes. When Johnson asks, “Was your father a big man?”, Baxter can only laugh at his cheap psychology. His sarcastic laughter puts an end to Johnson’s moment of smug superiority. It also puts Johnson into a rage that ends with his killing of Baxter.
This is a suspect who understands the instincts of his interrogator, a soul tormented by thoughts and involuntary memories that are frighteningly like those of the criminals he pursues. Interspersed are pictures in Johnson’s mind of the crime scenes he has investigated. We understand that he is haunted by nightmares he cannot escape, desperate for assistance which no one can provide.
After the failures of his wife and the Det. Super., the only who who could possibly help him with his inner demons is the perp himself, Baxter. And he refuses, saying – in almost his last words – “Help your bloody self,” repeating exactly what Cartwright had told him (though in the chronology of events Cartwright speaks later). When Johnson tells him, “I know you – too well,” he’s announcing a death sentence. He cuts off his last impulse to reach out to the only person left who understands him. Baxter must die because the policeman knows that he knows his (Johnson’s) mind intimately. He knows that Baxter “was saying, like, ‘Welcome home,’ ” where home is the place where the demons live. In killing Baxter, he tries in vain to do away with the part of himself that he loathes. Only when he says, “God! Oh God!” at the end does he realize and accept his own guilt. Angelic children’s voices are heard singing over the final words.
The last scene reminded me of “M” where the underworld figures understand the child-murderer (Peter Lorre) all too well, such that they are on the verge of forgiving him. Or tearing him to pieces.
Here it’s not just the architecture that’s brutalist. Barry Stoller’s score underscores the bleakness. This underrated film is more than dark, it’s pitch black, Dostoyevskian in its plumbing of depravity. The light shining in the interrogation room is harsh and unsparing, the bulb like an unblinking eyeball. In this still, the glare is softened.
The cop-who-can’t-leave-it-at-work theme is taken to excruciating lengths, making “The Offence” at times hard to watch. “Midsomer Murders” this ain’t. Should be shown at police academies as a cautionary tale.
© Hamilton Beck
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