The Offence (1972)

The Offence is a 1972 drama film, based upon the acclaimed 1968 stage play This Story of Yours by John Hopkins, directed by Sidney Lumet under the working title Something Like the Truth. It stars Sean Connery as frustrated, obsessively aggressive police detective Johnson who snaps and kills Kenneth Baxter (Ian Bannen), a man who has been picked up for acting strangely in the street, and whom he comes to suspect in a series of child rapes. The film explores Johnson's varied, often aggressive attempts at rationalizing towards a number of people what he did for what he thought Baxter to be, also using his gruesome job as a police officer as an excuse. It is not until the end of the film that the whole interrogation scene where he killed Baxter is seen in a prolonged flashback, revealing Johnson's true motives for the murder he committed. The tagline is "After 20 years what Detective-Sergeant Johnson has seen and done is destroying him." It is the only film that Sir Harrison Birtwistle has written music for.