‘Something like the truth’: Confronting the Honesty of Brutalism and Post-War Planning in The Offence

Abstract

This article explores the 1973 thriller The Offence in relation to its representation and utilisation of post-war urban planning and modernist architecture, with particular reference to brutalism and new towns. It considers the film to be at a seminal intersection between British cinema and post-war modernism, building on and ultimately eclipsing Get Carter and A Clockwork Orange which have received much of the critical attention in this specialised discourse. While the film is ostensibly a character study of a troubled policeman, Detective Sergeant Johnson, I argue that The Offence’s engagement with post-war urban planning and modernist spatiality is its defining feature. The film’s extensive location shooting in Bracknell, utilising modernist and brutalist spaces, offers a direct intervention into architectural and planning discourses of the period. The Offence’s bleak narrative set within the context of a modernist new town reflects criticisms of such quintessentially post-war spaces as ‘subtopias’ to quote Ian Nairn’s polemical attacks in his 1955 book Outrage. The architectural centrepiece of The Offence is the entirely purpose-built set of the police station, where Johnson interrogates suspected child molester Baxter. As an exemplar of brutalist architecture the space conforms to Katherine Shonfield’s characterisation of brutalism as inherently honest, ‘dragging to the surface what we are in the habit of covering up’. The film’s extensive use of brutalist locations, then, creates a unique intersection and tension between the architectural style’s demand for a raw, honest edifice and the narrative’s central investigation into the impossibility of finding objective truth. The Offence is thus due a necessary reappraisal as a radical ethical and aesthetic engagement with post-war planning and architecture within British cinema.