His life in my power
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | His life in my power |
| Original title | The Offence |
| Country of production | United Kingdom |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1973 (shot 1972) |
| length | 113 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Sidney Lumet |
| script | John Hopkins |
| production | Denis O'Dell |
| music | Harrison Birtwistle |
| camera | Gerry Fisher |
| cut | John Victor Smith |
| occupation | |
| |
His life in my violence (Original title: The Offence ) is a British psychological thriller by Sidney Lumet from 1973 . It stars Sean Connery , Trevor Howard , Ian Bannen and Vivien Merchant .
During interrogation, a British police sergeant injured a child abuse suspect so seriously that the man died from his injuries. In non- chronological order , the film tells how it came to be.
action
At a police station, a group of officers break into a room where a man is standing with clenched fists next to a motionless person at his feet. When he tries to escort him out, he knocks down the officers. The sound of an alarm bell brings the man back to reality; shocked, he realizes what he has done.
Sergeant Johnson, the man from the opening sequence , investigates - so far unsuccessfully - in a series of rapes of children. Three children have already been mistreated, so the police are monitoring the schools in the area. Nevertheless, another girl disappears after being mistreated after a search but found alive. Because the girl is being immobilized by paramedics, Johnson does not receive a description of the perpetrator. A woman who saw the child with the suspected perpetrator makes a statement at the police station hours after the incident, and cannot provide a useful description either.
The police picks up relevant previous convictions and interrogates informers who work for them. By chance, two officers come across a disoriented looking man in dirty clothes and take him to the police station. The officers on watch express suspicion that the man named Kenneth Baxter may be the wanted rapist. During the subsequent interrogation, the outcome of which was shown at the beginning of the film, Johnson injured Baxter so badly that he had to be hospitalized. The sergeant is suspended from duty.
Johnson goes home, where he gets drunk and humiliates his wife. After 20 years of police service, he is no longer able to deal with the acts of violence and suicides that he witnessed in the course of his investigative activities. He does not want to or cannot communicate with his wife.
When Baxter dies in the hospital, Johnson is picked up by two colleagues that night and taken back to the station. There he is questioned by Chief Detective Cartwright, who accuses him of not being able to separate professional and private matters. The conversation between the men escalates, and Cartwright calls Johnson a "failure" (in the original: "Detective Sergeant all your life!").
In the last quarter, the film describes Baxter's interrogation in detail: Baxter, who sees himself as the victim of many years of accumulated humiliation and the aggression that has accumulated as a result, discovers the same suppressed emotions in Johnson. Baxter, who is verbally equal to Johnson, confronts the police officer with his own violent fantasies, who ultimately knocks the suspect unconscious. Whether Baxter was the actual perpetrator remains open, as there is no confession. The film ends with the same images it started with: Johnson fights with fellow police officers who want to remove him from the interrogation room until an alarm bell rips Johnson out of his trance .
background
Production and film launch
John Hopkins wrote the screenplay for his 1968 London Royal Court Theater premiered the play This Story of Yours (German This story of you , 1970). Filming under the working title Something Like the Truth took place in and around Bracknell , England, in March and April 1972 . Tantallon film, the joint production company of Sean Connery, Richard Hatton and Denis O'Dell , produced the film for about 900,000 US dollars . The funding came from United Artists as part of an offer the film studio made to Connery to accept the lead role in the James Bond film Diamond Fever .
While the British censorship authority BBFC gave the film an "X" (= absolute youth ban) on August 11, 1972, in the Federal Republic of Germany the FSK gave it a release "from 16 years of age".
United Artists first opened the film in 1973, in Germany on January 26th. The film was, with cautious criticism, a financial failure and only made its production costs around nine years after its theatrical release.
In 1974 Ian Bannen was nominated for the British Academy Film Award for Best Supporting Actor for his acting , but the award went to Arthur Lowe for The Successful (O Lucky Man!) .
analysis
Narrative structure
Hopkins' play consists of three acts : In the first, Sergeant Johnson returns home and has an argument with his wife while waiting for news of whether the badly injured Baxter will get through or not. In the second act, Johnson is questioned by Superintendent Cartwright about the circumstances surrounding Baxter's death. The third act, which is set before the first, depicts Baxter's interrogation by Johnson in a flashback .
The filming resolves the chronological sequence of events even more. The film begins with the violent end of the interrogation, then describes in a first flashback the course of the day preceding the interrogation: the kidnapping and discovery of the fourth victim, the police search and Baxter's arrest and mistreatment by Johnson. With Johnson's suspension, the film returns to chronological narration. This is followed by the second and third parts of the film (the first and second act of the play), Johnson's argument with his wife after his return home and the questioning of Johnson by Cartwright on the guard the next morning. The fourth part of the film describes, analogous to the third act of the play, in a renewed flashback, Johnson and Baxter's confrontation in detail. The narrative circle is closed with the final image, which is identical to the beginning.
The non-linear impression of the narrative is reinforced by further short interruptions: During Johnson's drive home, between his suspension and his arrival at his apartment, you can see some of the horrific images he saw in earlier missions. In the last, most detailed description of the interrogation, a short scene between Johnson and a colleague has been cut.
subjects
Characters as mirror images
Director Lumet in an interview before shooting began: “This film is about a police officer who picks up a criminal. John Hopkins, the author, spares you nothing. There is no easy way out. The criminal is a rapist, and during interrogation it turns out that the two are simply different sides of the same coin, but with a direct psychological connection between them. When the policeman realizes this, he is so frightened that he beats the other man to death. […] It's one of the most complex things I've ever read. [...] John [Hopkins] is constantly looking for the hell within us. "
Lumet shows Johnson as Baxter's mirror image, or Baxter as Johnson's. In several scenes you can see Johnson imagining the seduction and abuse of the girl from the point of view of the perpetrator, and in a reverse cut you see Johnson's face bending over the girl. During the interrogation, the two men change roles, so to speak - while Baxter asks the violent sergeant for protection, Johnson, when he clearly recognizes his own inclinations, begs the other person's help.
Shortly before the end of the film, Johnson explains what he is doing to a colleague - or himself - citing a kind of tacit agreement: “Everything I've ever felt, always wanted to feel, in an instant. Beat him up. Keep hitting. Somehow I had no other choice. I - I wanted what he could give me. Sit there and let me beat you up. I wanted this. He knew it. He said it to me like 'welcome home'. I had to kill him. ”(Originally:“ Every single thing I've ever felt, wanted to feel, in one moment. Hitting him. I had to hit him again. Somehow I - I didn't have any choice. I wanted what he could give me. Sitting there. Letting me hit him. I wanted that. He knew. He was saying like 'welcome home'. I had to kill him. ")
Speechlessness and violence
Another theme of the film is the inability or unwillingness to communicate. “I have nothing to say to you,” said Baxter Johnson at the beginning of the interrogation. “I didn't say anything to him,” Johnson summarized almost proudly the questioning by his superior Cartwright, and he rejected his wife with the words, “I. don't want to talk to you about it ”. When Johnson tells his wife about his terrible experiences after 20 years of silence, she escapes from the room and throws up. A witness who saw the child accompanied by his rapist did not give her testimony until hours later at the police station.
The representation of violence and its causes and effects is ambivalent. In the case of Johnson and Baxter, this is suggested as the inevitable result of unprocessed violent impressions or humiliations that result in new violence. Baxter admits his deep-seated aggression stemming from the humiliation of classmates in his youth; Johnson confesses to his wife and Cartwright that the horrors seen in years of police work continue to have an effect on him.
In the case of Johnson and his wife, Johnson and Baxter and the girl and her tormentor (who, in one of Johnson's fantasies, smiles at the abuser before being mistreated), violence and humiliation have taken the place of communication. In all cases, violence is portrayed as being carried out exclusively by men, while the female roles appear as passive victims. Also, the latent violence is never associated with the social milieu of those involved, a fact that some critics blamed the film and the play.
criticism
“As reserved as it is, the introduction (written by Hopkins himself) sabotages the strange, claustrophobic duel [of the play] [...] Embedded in a 'realistic' police scenario, the dialogues and situations have an echo of intentionally artistic melodrama . Nonetheless fascinating, with outstanding achievements from Connery and (especially) Bannen. "
“Questionable: […] The filmed theater is poorly concealed, the dialogue remains sophisticated stage language, the sexual sadism is all too effectively exaggerated, and the social and political prerequisites for the misery described are left out, as in the play. But Connery is almost as intense in the grateful role as Vivien Merchant and Ian Bannen next to him. "
“A police sergeant who has killed a sexual offender during interrogation must realize during his investigation that he has the same criminal tendency. The tragedy of the individual becomes a symbol of a society that projects its own bad attitudes onto minorities. In contrast to its original, however, the film can hardly make the social structures behind the events clear and evades to the level of the psychological thriller with excellent actors. "
DVD
The Offense was released in 2004 in Europe as a DVD from MGM , 2008 in the UK in a new edition by the provider optimum. The French DVD by Wild Side Video, released in 2009, is currently the only release of the film in a version that retains the original aspect ratio of 1: 1.66 . In the USA , the film has been available since 2010 as a DVD-R “ On-Demand ” offered by MGM .
literature
- John Hopkins: This Story of Yours , Penguin Modern Playwrights 9 , Penguin Books 1969, ISBN 978-0-14-045010-1 .
Web links
- The Offense in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Mel Gussow: Poice story at Long Wharf , review of This Story of Yours in The New York Times of 23 October 1981 called on 18 May 2012 found.
- ↑ a b Christopher Bray: Sean Connery: The Measure of a Man, Faber and Faber, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-571-23807-1 , pp. 174-180.
- ↑ His life under my control on the British Board of Film Classification
- ↑ a b c d His life in my power in the lexicon of international films
- ↑ His life in my power in the Internet Movie Database .
- ↑ Sidney Lumet in an interview with Susan Merrill in Films in Review, November 1973, reprinted in Joanna E. Rapf (ed.): Sidney Lumet: Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, 2006, ISBN 1-57806-723-5 , pp. 45.
- ↑ a b Short review by Wolf Donner in Die Zeit No. 07/1973 of February 9, 1973, accessed on May 18, 2012.
- ↑ "Discreet as it is, the opening-out process (effected by Hopkins himself) has sabotaged the strange, claustrophobic duel [...] embedded in a 'realistic' police scene, dialogue and situations now have a ring of arty melodrama. Fascinating, nevertheless, with outstanding performances from Connery and (especially) Bannen. "- Time Out Film Guide, Seventh Edition 1999, Penguin, London 1998.