Word: lumet
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Directed by SIDNEY LUMET...
...George Roy Hill, John Frankenheimer began his career as a television director. Though he has made some good movies since (such as The Manchurian Candidate), his staging of Iceman has the intensity and immediacy that characterized the best early TV drama. He also catches, rather better than Sidney Lumet did in his 1960 TV production for Play of the Week, the play's roiling richness, the tidal flow from realistic melodrama into tragedy...
Whenever Sidney Lumet and Sean Connery get together, the subject seems to be sadomasochism. It was the major theme of The Hill, a subtext of The Anderson Tapes, and now, in The Offence, it is once again a central preoccupation...
...Lumet's direction strives to give to material that is neither edifying nor suspenseful a fake profundity, stretching it to unconscionable lengths. But at least he allows his actors plenty of room to roam. Connery's confession to his wife (Vivien Merchant) of his long struggle to save his sanity, and her recognition of unconscious complicity with the forces that are driving him crazy, is a gripping scene, full of what might be termed home truth. Trevor Howard, as a fellow officer investigating Connery, plays an almost equally strong scene as he tries to get Connery...
...something any sensible per son will have long since guessed. That is the trouble with sadomasochism as a subject. It is easy to catch its surface symptoms, but its roots are too deeply buried to be dug up and exposed by any but the most skilled and sensitive artists. Lumet is not one of them. Despite good acting, audiences will want to avoid The Offence...