The Offence (1973)

Nothing I have done can be one half as bad as the thoughts in your head.

John Hopkins was already a successful television dramatist by the time he took to the stage. He had over fifty episodes of the groundbreaking TV cop series Z Cars¹ under his belt, as well as a quartet of plays, Talking to a Stranger (1966), which had met with huge critical acclaim – “the first authentic masterpiece written directly for television” - and provided a blueprint for the dysfunctional misery that would become British soap opera. But his new idea couldn’t possibly work on television: despite the British public’s appetite for gloom, Hopkins believed that your average TV audience wouldn’t “sit and be harrowed for two-and-a-half hours.”

And harrowing it was: This Story of Yours is structured as a triptych of duologues between the mentally disintegrating Detective Sergeant “Johnny” Johnson and his wife Maureen, Detective Superintendent Cartwright, and a suspected paedophile named Kenneth Baxter, who Johnson beats to death in custody. The play is an aria of violent language (largely swear-free, unless you think “bloody” is swearing), escalating from tormented dialogue to murder, a grim extension of Hopkins’s work on Z Cars and an attempt to dramatize a policeman’s life as a psychic burden impossible to bear. As Hopkins said, “the fact that [Johnson] is a policeman dramatizes almost beyond bearing the flaw in his character, just as our need for protection, and our need then socially to ostracise them if humanly possible, says a great deal more about us than it does about the police.” For Hopkins, the police are a necessary – if not essential – part of society, but professional empathy comes with a terrible price.

This Story of Yours opened at the Royal Court in December 1968 to poor-to-middling reviews,² but it found favour with one audience member. Sean Connery had been chafing against his Bond stardom for a while and wanted to get back to basics. His earlier TV work had highlighted the actor rather than the star, with performances in O’Neill’s Anna Christie (1957), Miller’s The Crucible (1959), Anouilh’s Colombe (1960), the monumental fifteen-part An Age of Kings (a 1960 serialised adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays), and TV movie versions of Macbeth (1961) and Anna Karenina (1961). Theatre was out of the question – Connery had no appetite for the stage – but there was a strong showcase role in Detective Sergeant Johnson. He just needed the backing of a studio. Thankfully, he had one desperate to work with him.

After George Lazenby’s one-and-done performance in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), United Artists wanted Connery back in the tux; Connery saw an opportunity not only to score a huge payday (a tidy $1.25m), but also guarantee backing for the kind of film he really wanted to make. The studio agreed a two-picture deal. While Connery’s mooted Macbeth would go the way of Duncan once the Polanski production went into principal photography and a biopic of the explorer Richard Burton (written by Hopkins) would stumble, This Story of Yours, now titled Something Like the Truth,³ got the green light.

Something Like the Truth needed a director with chops, and who better than Sidney Lumet? Lumet was something of an anomaly – a prestigious director in love with the written word who rarely wrote himself, and whose passion for theatre saw him return time and again to adaptations of stage work as a “refresher in fundamentals.” Connery had worked with Lumet previously on The Hill (1965),⁴ a brilliant and uncompromising drama that boasted Connery’s finest on-screen performance to date, as well as the light-hearted caper The Anderson Tapes (1971). He was therefore the steady pair of hands sorely needed to steer what could have been seen as an ill-advised vanity project.

Unlike Deathtrap, however, The Offence (as it was finally known) is not a direct adaptation from stage to screen, eschewing the three-act structure of the play for a four-act structure (with framing) for the film. One of the biggest changes Hopkins made to the screenplay was to condense his entire play into the second hour, effectively cutting fifty-minute acts into twenty-minute scenes. The first hour of the film opens up the story to include the disappearance of Janie (Maxine Gordon) and subsequent search, and is vital to establishing Johnson’s commitment to the job, his standing among his colleagues, and the grim environment of the story.

And make no mistake, it is grim. Lumet and cinematographer Gerry Fisher revel in the Ballardian brutalist hellscape that is Bracknell, a place of flat-roof pubs, pebble-dashed concrete, sinister underpasses and perpetual drizzle. It is a town of roads without pavements, weed-ridden and scarred by desire paths, soaked in dingy greys and putrid greens, and designed by architects who never met a human being in their lives. Johnson’s home is in the imposing Point Royal (now a listed building, for crying out loud), a fancy name for what looks like a mildew-spotted prison. Even the police station appears to have been abandoned halfway through construction, with exposed wiring and discarded stepladders littering the corridors. The inner city may have poverty, but it can at least demonstrate life; the new town appears to exist on the periphery of civilisation, windswept and bleak, a failed and forsaken experiment in social engineering, and the perfect external expression of Johnson’s fractured and desperate psyche.

Detective Sergeant Johnson is Connery’s finest performance, leaning on his hard man persona in the first half before the façade drops, his infected wound of a mind begins to open and the pus spills forth. He jettisons the play’s recurring business of Johnson holding his nose and trying to exhale, as if he’s trying to pop his ears, and instead lets the madness simmer just below the surface, which makes his brawny physicality intensely dangerous. His presence at the school draws suspicious looks from the waiting mothers, and his discovery of Janie is poisoned by his size – he pins her down to stop her panicking, and the camera lingers on him as if to suggest he could be responsible for her assault, or at least has the capacity for it. This is mirrored in the scene with his wife Maureen (the great Vivien Merchant⁵), where he pins her to the sofa, ranting about sex in a way that feels like a prelude to rape. Connery’s charm previously resided in his musclebound masculinity; here it becomes a weapon.

What Johnson needs is a mental enema and absolution for his bloody thoughts. The second half of The Offence contracts as Johnson turns in on himself, struggling to communicate the nature of his disease when all people see are the symptoms. Maureen’s insistence that he talk to her results in sick, staccato poetry, a gibberish combination of all the horror he’s seen – savaged women and children, suicides and accidents – that make it sound like a single atrocity so incoherently horrific it prompts Maureen to be violently ill. Detective Superintendent Cartwright (a booze-grizzled Trevor Howard) is next on the list, charged with compiling a report on the Baxter’s death, but Cartwright’s remit is to massage rather than listen: he wants “something like the truth” to keep the brass happy. And Johnson can no more give Cartwright a nice, easily digestible cover story than he can take Cartwright’s advice to keep his professional and personal life separate, a schizophrenic solution to encroaching insanity. Because Johnson has already passed the point of no return; he has been confronted with his shadow self.

This shadow is Kenneth Baxter (a terrifically seedy and wheedling Ian Bannen⁶), whose appearance in the final twenty minutes marks the film’s high point. Baxter’s guilt is deliberately ambiguous, though it’s easy to read him as a child molester: his expensive coat is spattered with mud and he sports an incriminating scratch on his forehead.⁷ It also doesn’t help that Baxter has one of the sleaziest moustaches ever seen on film. As Johnson probes his suspect further (sometimes painfully literally), it becomes apparent that Baxter’s guilt may less be a case of discovery than a terrible projection by his interrogator. Johnson purports to know why Baxter raped those girls – a Maureen-like frigid wife at home, an abusive childhood, an ever-tightening knot of inadequacy and rage – but this is more self-portrait than perception, and Baxter knows it. To Baxter, Johnson is just another in a long line of bullies to be castrated. His instinctive eye for Johnson’s vulnerability and his compulsion to exploit it proves to be both his triumph and his doom. It’s possible that Baxter is some master manipulator and a child molester, but it’s also equally possible that his behaviour represents a perverse need to fight back against the gorilla in the room. It’s only after the fact, when he’s sitting in a waiting room with his fellow officers after the Cartwright interview, that Johnson realises Baxter’s death has provided some level of therapy, even if he’s now admitting to murder and acknowledging the beast within. It’s a fitting coda for the story (which doesn’t appear in the play), reiterating the irrelevance of Baxter’s guilt. This was never about him; it was only ever about Johnson.

The Offence was a tough sell for Connery fans expecting Dirty Harry and ultimately getting something more like The Pawnbroker⁸. While the movie was a critical success, United Artists sensed a commercial dud and did little to promote the film, refusing to give it a wide international release and putting the kibosh on the two-picture deal with Connery. That the film took over nine years to recoup its paltry budget shows how little audiences wanted it in their heads, but then audiences aren’t always the best judge of integrity. For all its rawness and downright unpleasantness, The Offence is still a brave move from Connery, not only playing one of the ugliest roles of his career, but also surrounding himself with a top-tier supporting cast to make him work that little bit harder. Hopkins’s screenplay is a huge improvement on his original play, which is rarely revived for good reason: it’s a slog. And Lumet is in fine form, demonstrating his flair for blocking and highlighting performance in a way that is both visually dynamic and thematically rich. And I haven’t even mentioned (Sir) Harrison Birtwhistle’s only film score, what I can only describe as an electronic miasma of panic that sounds like a distress beacon from another world.

While The Offence has certainly picked up its enthusiasts over the years, it remains an uncomfortable watch, and difficult to recommend to anyone without the caveat that it’s almost impossible to enjoy the movie in any traditional sense of the word. While it’s possible to appreciate everything on show here, The Offence fundamentally exists inside Detective Sergeant Johnson’s head. And that is an awful, sickening place to be.

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Next Up: “Was she really mad enough to plot her own murder?”

1. The brainchild of Troy Kennedy Martin - he of The Italian Job and Edge of Darkness, to name but two - Z Cars represented a seismic shift in cop dramas and a counterpoint to the cosiness of Dixon of Dock Green. The show followed a number of officers patrolling the fictional Newtown in the north of England, and boasted a rich cast of character actors, including Brian Blessed, Colin Welland, and James Ellis (who parodied Dixon’s “Evenin’ all” in the underseen and utterly brilliant ‘90s sitcom Nightingales). Socially relevant and frequently unsympathetic towards the police, the show ran for over 800 episodes, with a spin-off - Softly, Softly - running for a further 120.

2. The play didn’t make it to the United States until well after The Offence came out and proved to be an oppressive experience for theatregoers. One thing that would’ve made it a must-see for Your Humble Narrator: Baxter was played by none other than J.T. Walsh.

3. The phrase is repeated throughout the play, implying there is no absolute truth in the matter of Baxter’s death, just - to quote David Milch - “a lie agreed upon”.

4. For those keeping score at home, The Hill also marks the first time Connery appeared sans toupee. He would do so again for The Offence.

5. And for those who don’t know, Vivien Merchant was the first wife of Harold Pinter, and one of the best interpreters of his work. If you haven’t already seen it, I strongly recommend watching The Homecoming (1973), playing a role that is the polar opposite of Maureen.

6. I really can’t overstate how good Bannen is in The Offence, as he was in everything. While I appreciate the other two-handers, the face-off between him and Connery could have gone on for hours, and I’d have lapped it up. Spoiler warning: we’ll be talking about him again in the next post …

7. The scratch isn’t mentioned in the play’s description of Baxter and it’s never mentioned in the dialogue. It’s very obviously a scratch from human fingernails, so you could argue that Baxter’s guilt is less ambiguous in the film. That said, I’ve never been wholly convinced that Baxter was anything other than a drunken weirdo in a nice coat.

8. Which also features the kind of terrifying, disjointed flashbacks Johnson suffers in The Offence.