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Filming locations of The Offence (1973), please?


Hi everyone

I love this film - it is dark, so brutal, so of its time, early 70s.

I know this film was mainly shot in Bracknell, Berkshire, but what about the other scenes? Was it all shot in Bracknell or were some scenes shot in London?

There is the 'memory montage' scene where his memory recoils back in time to previous murders/horrific encounters he has had to deal with. Some of the shots here show suburban 1970s streets, presumably London. Where is this, exactly? There is a scene of a body being lowered down off a railway embankment to an ambulance? Where is this? I had always presumed that owing to the Bracknell-London railway configuration, that travelling into Clapham Junction from Bracknell, that these scenes might indeed be shot at Clapham Junction, below the railway, west side, taken from the streets looking upwards (the geography would seem right, having viewed this section of film) but never sure. I would really love to know as much detail about this TRULY brilliant film as possible, including as much intimate detail about the filming location as possible.

The scenes which show a woman lying dead, blood-splattered, in a pet shop, where is this? The scene where the corpse is shown hanging from a tree, hanged, completely decomposed.. does anyone know where this was shot?

I understand that a good deal of the film was shot around Point Royal, the brutalist high-rise tower block in Rectory Lane, Bracknell, Berkshire, RG12, and Cross Fell, overlooking the pond, Mill Pond, Bracknell. But what of the other locations shown in the film? Where were they?

For me, The Offence 1973 is a film that is truly unique, and should be celebrated, highly. I remember when I first saw it on British TV in 1993, living in Brighton. It haunted me, for many years. I was just 19 years old, then. The Offence 1973 is brutal, stark, totally crushing, a grey, menacing world of strangled housing estates, ring-roads, town centres, underpasses, and open heathland where girls get abducted, raped and murdered. It is sharply-defined, clear in its intention; an unbearable, and, horrifyingly-bleak, film - bleak in so many different ways - yet it captures, in my view, immaculately, suburban life in the early 1970s in the eternally-grey, rain-soaked, sprawling, depressed, murderous, overspill housing estates close to London, the always night-time, always-back alley, seedy life of a suspected child abuser, and the impassivity and then gross over-reactions of police and state to do anything about child abuse, and the stifling elements of paranoia, urban decay and alienation and the horrors of child murder.

Thanks everyone.

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