As much as I wish I could, I cannot add the two-and-a-half hours spent Thursday evening in a theater with Sidney Lumet to the life-changing 56 seconds I spent talking to him last month. His appearance at BAM–for a super-rare screening of his other, cop-not-named-Serpico-suffering-an-existential-crisis film of 1973, The Offence–instead culminated in one of the institution’s regular post-screening chats with Elliott Stein, and I had to share the Q&A with a dozen or so other reverent moviegoers.

Sidney Lumet relives the grand old days of television and self-pitying action stars with BAM fixture Elliott Stein (Photo: STV)
Like it matters. As always, it is the little things that count, like glancing at Lumet in the row behind mine, where he sat with his wife viewing Sean Connery’s implosive tour de force for the first time in 20 years. Or watching him squirm at the recollection of the film’s British crew calling him “governor” rather than “director.” Or defending Connery and Vin Diesel against “snobs who have things against action heroes.” Or corollating The Offence with his recent Find Me Guilty even further by calling them “the two worst distribution jobs I’ve ever had.”
“The whole premise–and this was understood from the beginning–was that there was a wonderful theater in London then called the Putnam,” Lumet told Stein. “It was a wonderful arthouse; the expenses were very low in it. And so you could put a picture there and it would stay for weeks and weeks and find an audience. And we were supposed to open at the Putnam in October or something like that. And all of the sudden we weren’t opening there; we opened at the Odeon Leicester Square on Christmas. Now, I don’t know if you know what the Odeon Leicester Square is, but it’s a combination of Radio City Music Hall, the Paramout, the Strand–all of those. It seats like 4,000 or 5,000 people. You put Star Wars in there. It’s that kind of theater. And we were out in a week. And then with that happening, the American release was even worse.”

The Offence‘s grim, working-class cop drama could not have helped matters, especially with Connery’s James Bond persona still dominating the pop-cultural mind (Connery, who took no salary on the picture, received United Artists’ green light only after agreeing to make 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever). Imagine dropping by the theater in 1973 and seeing 007 recast as Detective Sergeant Johnson, a haunted investigator charged with finding a serial killer who has been abducting and murdering schoolgirls. Imagine recoiling in your seat as Connery’s demons consume him before moving on to his long-suffering wife (Vivian Merchant), his superior (Trevor Howard) and finally claiming his chief suspect (a leering, lascivious Ian Bannen). Imagine the moral specter of Dirty Harry plunged through the prism of British kitchen-sink dramas like Look Back in Anger and This Sporting Life, and then get the hell out of the way of a fairly lethal (if not mildly pretentious) cascade of self-loathing.
Characteristically for a Lumet film, the acting is first-rate, the direction natural–especially for a film mostly comprising long, two-person set pieces once-removed from the stage. “It’s a very complicated, worked-out, thought-out movie technique,” Lumet said. “As you know, small spaces have never bothered me, from my first picture on. When we did Long Day’s Journey Into Night, that was four people in one room for thee and a half hours. It’s just a combination of lenses, lighting, camaera elevation. It’s complicated.”
Stein eventually came around to asking about the influence of Lumet’s famous live television background on quick, dirty productions like The Offence–shot in less than a month for under $900,000. “I did a half-hour melodrama called Danger on Tuesday nights, and on Sundays, I did a show called You Are There. I did two half-hour shows a week–live. And what happens as a result of that is that first of all, you learn to really split your concentration. It meant I had to carry eight shows in my head: The shows I was doing right then and there; the casting for two shows for next week; the physical sets, props and production of the shows two weeks down the line; and working on the scripts of the shows three weeks down the line. So you’re doing eight shows. Terrific. Highly recommended.
“And what it taught us was that it’s a television show. There’s another one next week. Now, that may sound disrespectful. Quite the reverse. It’s a wonderful attitude in the sense that you relax, and every piece of work isn’t life and death. People always say, ‘Oh my God, look at the large number of movies you’ve done.’ I don’t know how many movies I’ve done. Terrific.”
“Forty-two,” Stein said.
“Forty-two? I think it’s more,” Lumet said winkingly. “But it’s important to not think about everything being for history, or if it’s art. All those big words–history, art.” He shrugged, waved, swatted the words out of the air. “Just do your work. The rest will take care of itself.”
Ha. Will it ever.

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