The Offence (1973)

“Nothing I have done can be one half as bad as the thoughts in your head.” – Kenneth Baxter

Number of Times Seen – 1 (18 Jul 2017)

Brief Synopsis – A police detective has a breakdown while interrogating a prisoner and must recount what led up to the confrontation.

My Take on it – I had been putting off watching this film for quite a while because I knew that it had a very dark theme to it, but since I’m trying to watch more movies starring Sean Connery lately, I decided to take the plunge and watch this one.

The story is actually quite interesting but I was extremely disappointed by the way that they presented this whole story to us.

Both Sean Connery and Trevor Howard are both fine here but it seems to me that they are trying way too hard here to present the story in a way that shows how extremely difficult it can be on detectives in such units.

This film was made at a time when they could present such a story in a less graphic manner and I’m sure that were it to be made nowadays, they would have gotten much more graphic about it all.

Despite this, they do a fine job of making the story itself seem powerful eventhough it drags a bit too much along the way.

Perhaps they should have trimmed it a bit in the middle and then things might have worked even better.

Bottom Line – The story actually is interesting yet I was disappointed as to how it was presented to us. Connery and Howard are both fine here, but they try too hard to make it all seem so psychologically difficult on detectives who perform such a job.  If this were to be made now, it would be more graphic in its description of the situations but not necessarily would it be able to be more powerful of a story.  Too much of the way that the story is told drags on and it might have been better if it would have been a bit shorter and not feel stretched out.

MovieRob’s Favorite Trivia – The movie took just one month to film, at a low cost of one million dollars. Despite this, and excellent notices, it failed to make any profit for nine years, and went unreleased in several countries, including the major market of France. (From IMDB)

Rating – BAFTA Worthy

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