Opening with police sergeant Sean Connery held down by his colleagues after smashing a suspect’s face in during
an interrogation, the narrative bends over itself to reveal the "before" and the "after" of the beating. Structured like
a series of suffocating duets, Sidney Lumet’s pungent crime drama maps out the detective’s burning fuse during a
child molestation case, dissecting his interactions with his drab wife (Vivien Merchant), a questioning lieutenant
(Trevor Howard), and, most tellingly, the doomed bloke picked up during the investigation (Ian Bannen). Less well-known than his other British pictures (The Hill, The Deadly Affair, Murder on the Orient Express), this unrelentingly
somber policier inaugurates a newfound force in Lumet’s work. The story, adapted by John Hopkins from his play,
abounds in stylistic tics (recurring visual motifs, various events replayed several times, color coding), but the flashiness that
pockmarked much of the director’s earlier work has been pruned to hushed, concentrated intensity. Likewise, the
movie looks ahead to the bathed-in-gray thematics of Lumet’s later studies of law & order ambivalence -- Connery’s
pressure-cooker copper, plagued with lurid images palpitating inside his brain, is the template for the protagonists
of Serpico, Prince of the City and Q & A. Connery pinpoints some fantastic shadings of bullying, dissatisfaction and
self-disgust, matched by Bannen’s peerless razzing -- the culminating pounding is less liberating purgation than guilt
transference, christened by Bannen’s bloodied leer. Cinematography by Gerry Fisher. With Derek Newark,
John Hallam, and Peter Bowles.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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