The Offence at 50: brutalism, Bracknell and Sidney Lumet’s dark police drama

Like many British films of the 1960s and 70s, Sidney Lumet’s The Offence (1973) benefits from an outsider’s eye. The American director’s distinctive vision created an unusual film that makes the most of Britain’s new-town developments. The architecture of the film’s locations aids the disturbing atmosphere in a grim and gritty psychological drama that takes the police procedural into the darkest of realms.

The Offence is adapted from John Hopkins’ unforgiving play and follows a run-down police detective called Johnson (Sean Connery). In a suburban British town, a man is preying on young school girls. The area is on high alert and the police are on the hunt. But after the man’s latest victim is discovered, the police are drawing blanks. That is until Baxter (Ian Bannen) turns up: a strange, disoriented figure to whom all of the clues point. The years of endless horror working in the police have taken their toll on Johnson, however, and the interview with Baxter reveals more in common with the man than the detective dared consider.

Providing Connery with perhaps his most complex role, the film was his pet project. He insisted on producing it in return for reprising the role of James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever (1971). Lumet took the film to Bracknell, a town which has seen a number of films make the most of its unusual and distinctive architecture, including I Start Counting (1970) and Villain (1971). As with many similar developments, much has changed in the intervening years. Here are five locations from the film as they stand today.

Although much of Lumet’s film is set in and around the police station where the fateful main interview occurs, much of the film’s early segments focus on the locations of the crimes. One of the first buildings we see is the school attended by some of the pupils harmed by the criminal. The road in question is Crossfell just outside of Bracknell.

A shot of Johnson looking down the road shows a parking bay and the Point Royal tower block in the background. The bay is at the very top of Crossfell, and the view today is leafier but mostly unchanged.

Cutting from the previous shot, Lumet shows Johnson’s view down on to the school and the Clark Easton glass factory, also seen in the Richard Burton gangster film Villain. In later years, the school became the Heathlands Residential Home, though that has since been demolished and is in the process of being rebuilt. Only the curve of the road really shows the location to be the same.

The power of Lumet’s film comes from the ambiguity surrounding the crimes in question. We never see Baxter commit the offence, only circumstantial evidence of his guilt. The closest we see to criminal intent occurs when an old woman (Hilda Fenemore) sees a young girl (Maxine Gordon) walking off with a man. The sighting is shown first looking up a road called Arncliffe further along from Crossfell. The road is relatively unchanged today.

As the woman bends down to pick up her dropped shopping, she spots the girl walking on a desolate patch of land. Today, it would be difficult to have seen her, given the thicker trees and the way the land has been developed. But the curve of Arncliffe remains the same.

To recreate the view the elderly woman sees, a walk further on to the land is required. But a variety of things still impede the view, chiefly a McDonalds. The area is busy and unlike the lonely spot seen in the film.

Later on, after the sighting is reported, Lumet films another establishing shot of the area using Wildridings Road, which highlights the number of underpasses required for locals to walk between different housing developments. The road today is as it was.

Bracknell’s main town centre features heavily in the film though little of it survives today. As with many brutalist towns built in the decades after the war, most of it has been replaced or updated. This is evident in the scene in the high street when the police are pulling in suspects late at night. In one shot we see a suspect grabbed on what was once the intersection of Broadway and Crossway. The original centre has been entirely demolished, but the general imprint of the road can be seen looking down what is now The Avenue in the main shopping centre.

Further shots of Johnson talking to suspects use the location facing in the opposite direction, as does the scene when Baxter first makes his appearance down a winding ramp. However, with every possible building used to locate the shots having been destroyed, there seemed little point in attempting to recreate the location.

Though a number of interiors of the film’s police station were shot at Twickenham Studios, the exteriors were also shot in Bracknell. The first shot we see is at night showing the car park and a brutalist building which is now Bracknell Library. Today, the area is a little less tidy, but the location is easily recognisable.

After Johnson’s incident in the interview room, he is sent home. Though we are shown the interior of his flat before any establishing shots, the exterior shown when he is taken away by other officers shows it to be within the Point Royal block seen in earlier shots. The building was finished in 1964 and was listed quite recently so survives mostly intact.

Lumet was not the first director to make use of this otherworldly building. A few years before, David Greene used the building in his thematically similar film I Start Counting, again for the home of the film’s protagonist. Today, the stark contrast between its architecture and surrounding houses is still unusual. It’s an appropriately eerie location for such an unnerving film.

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