User Reviews

Late one evening in the English countryside two inebriated students on their way to visit Stephen (Dirk Bogarde) an Oxford professor who has been tutoring both, crash the car they are in killing the male ( Michael York). Stephen pulls Anna (Jaqueline Sassard)from the wreck and then possibly covers up for her part. The story then moves backwards in objective and dispassionate detail that first brings them and others together before the climax returns you with a group of facts to assess your own feelings about each character as the film plays itself out.

Accident is one cold and remote study of human behavior even for English academia. Director Joseph Losey and writer Harold Pinter erase any hints of compassion and understanding while ironically rendering men of vast knowledge non communicative to intimates as they try to come to terms with their own repressed desires. Bogarde is tailor maid to play Stephen. Defrosting little from his character in The Servant created by the same team he remains in a perpetual dark night of the soul even during moments of bliss. Fellow prof Charley ( Stanley Baker) is more nuanced and well played against type by Baker, even more deluded in his mid life crisis. The two have some excellent scenes together as Pinter's script and Losey's long takes build suspense fully but sometimes misleadingly. Vivien Merchant provides her usual laid back style of deceptive power while Michael York exudes youth and life with Jaquelline Sassard beautiful and comatose. There's also an excellent cameo by Harold Knox as a senior provost foreshadowing Stephen's future, who has to be reminded of his daughter's name. It's an almost soul less existence with all emotion cut off.

Accident reflects its title perfectly and in doing so makes it impossible for you not to look away. It is a challenging, exasperating and for some rewarding experience.

From the very first shot Losey lets us know that to get the most from this film it's not what you see, but what you perceive, that matters. The opening shot of a country house is held steady for our eyes whilst the sound of an approaching (speeding) car and, inevitably, the grinding of metal on gravel as the accident happens, dominates our hearing. And so it is for the rest of the film. What is important is not, necessarily, what we see, but what we discern.

The complexities of the relationships between the main characters, the effect on all of them brought by the simple presence of Anna (Sassard), their infidelities and insecurities all contribute to make this a spell-binding 100 minutes or so of classic cinema.

The spare, Pinteresque, dialogue inspires the viewer to attempt to untangle the dynamics between the characters. Some poignant photography (for instance, the symmetry of Anna and Stephen (Bogarde) as they gaze out over picturesque English countryside whilst leaning on a gate but, at the same time, teasing us as to whether or not they will draw closer,) adds to our desire for a better understanding of these people and their relationships.

The photography of rooms shot from odd angles (indeed, some of these shots seem designed to accentuate the angles of the characters every bit as much as the rooms themselves) all contribute to a complex web of relationships. Some sexy, sixties sax from John Dankworth adds an appropriate musical blend to the whole. And how many times does Stephen say to others `What are you doing?' as he strives to come to terms with his own infidelities and insecurities, let alone those of all those around him?

It's an intense, but approachable, movie with little concession to humour, save perhaps for a couple of comments from Stanley Baker's picaresque character, Charley. But don't let that put you off; this is intelligent, challenging cinema, a welcome refuge from the shoot ‘em up stream of movies we've become used to over the years.

***User-reviewer st-shot ("Accident keeps its distance", st-shot from United States, 11 April 2011) has a well-written commentary. So does Slime-3 ("Tense, measured actors piece which now shows it age", Slime-3 from Gloucester, England, 13 November 2012).***

"The Accident (1967, Joseph Losey)", a sexual foursome, is challenging but rewarding. It is written by Nicholas Mosley, adapted by Harold Pinter and directed by Joseph Losey. This third Losey-Pinter collaboration has a smoldering intensity even though there are many scenes concerning the everyday details of a comfortable University of Oxford society. "Accident" is intensely visual and austere. Casual film-goers are not its intended audience. Still, it has great emotional depth and is memorable.

It starts with a fatal car crash in the UK countryside. Stephen (Dick Bogarde), an Oxford professor of philosophy, rescues Anna (Jacqueline Sassard), an attractive young student, from the wrecked car. Stephen leaves behind the corpse of William (Michael York), whose frozen face becomes a recurring image. Flashbacks take us back to when Anna and William first become Stephen's pupils. Stephen is a repressed husband going through a middle-life crisis with a variety of frustrated ambitions. He has two kids, a wife Rosalind (Vivien Merchant) who is pregnant with a third, and the growing family resides in an elegant rural home. (Too bad philosophy professors are not as well compensated today.) As Stephen first meets and begins to tutor Anna, he is attracted to her but restrains from making a move. The chief instigator of most of the mischief that follows is another Oxford professor and TV personality Charley (Stanley Baker). Stephen and Charlie have an adversarial friendship which resembles a war, they are typically hostile to each other and openly competitive. Young William, an aristocrat, is athletic and vital. He never learns the Awful Truth about his new circle of friends.

"The Accident" seems to be portraying several pairs of dopplegangers, with the struggle between Stephen and Charley the featured one. Stephen is intensely jealous of Charlie but is stymied from catching up. Stephen mimics his rival by having his own extra-marital affair as well as attempting to appear on television. Rosalind and Anna are also two of a kind; they both facilitate Stephen's infidelity. (Rosalind's lack of concern to her husband over whether he is cheating seems dreamlike.) William, who is often in motion, has no human counterpart but sort of reminds us of the family dog, who we see fetch a ball once or twice. Stephen's two children have matching speech, etc.

Watching Stephen vs. Charley is mesmerizing. Dick Bogarde is an amazing actor. He reminds me of a less physical, more everyman-version of Marlon Brando. (Brando merged with Al Pacino?) There is often a primal quality with Bogarde's delivery that is stunning. Stanley Baker, who possessed a much-reviewed face (i.e., the consensus seems to be that he is as frightening as he is handsome), is another teapot that is always about to boil over. As with "The Servant (1963, Losey-Pinter)", there is a role reversal coming between two evenly matched, perpetually competing males.

The cinematography employs muted colors, contributing to a sense of gloom. Losey has a visual leitmotiv. He often frames points of interest between verticals and horizontals which reduce the effective frame size. When he does this we immediately recall William's deceased face, which is also restricted in the frame by the car wreckage. At the very minimum, Losey is doing this to remind us what is coming. By the way, I really love the sequence where Stephen has an affair with Francesca. The lovers are filmed silently with their conversation overdubbed. It creates a uniquely dreamlike experience.

This Losey and Pinter collaboration takes patience but will be enjoyed by cinemaphiles. However, please don't drive over to The revival theater showing this after having guzzled whiskey like a 1960s-era Oxford philosophy professor.

I can't agree with one reviewer here who states that "Accident" is the best of the Losey-Pinter collaborations. I much prefer "The Servant." "Accident" is about just that -- the film begins with a dreadful car crash and Stephen (Dirk Bogarde), an Oxford don, coming to the site and rescuing the young woman, Anna (Jacqueline Sussard) and taking her back to his house. The other occupant is dead.

The story unfolds from there, going back to what led up to this event. Stephen is going through a midlife crisis. He has two children, a pregnant wife, and not quite the success of his friend Charley (Stanley Baker) who has a television show. Stephen finds himself attracted to one of the students he tutors, Anna, but can't quite muster up the courage to approach her. Another student, William (Michael York) is a friend of hers; Stephen can't quite figure out the relationship, even after a night of boozing it up a la Virginia Woolf. Then he finds out something very interesting.

This has to be one of the slowest-moving films on record, filled with those famous Pinter pauses and emotions underneath the surface. And here, they're really underneath. Buried. John Coldstream quotes Michael York in "Dirk Bogarde" about being told "you can't underact," that film is so subtle a medium, the less you do, the better it is. Well, in "Accident," that's been taken to a new art form. York was impressed that while doing the scenes, it didn't come off like they were doing anything until you saw it on film. I don't know what film he saw.

The other problem with this film, and maybe it was just me going into an advanced stage of blindness, which I wasn't aware of, is that the night shots were black. I really couldn't see what was going on.

That all being said, the basic story is certainly a compelling one, of people leading normal, outwardly successful lives, with turgid emotions and unhappiness churning underneath. The scenes after the accident between Sussard and Bogarde are very striking and disturbing, as is the final moment of the film. We are reminded that what's on the surface has nothing to do with what really is in the heart.

"Accident" was a terrible emotional drain on Dirk Bogarde; unfortunately, because of the direction, we don't get to see why. He was a remarkable actor, but like any actor, he's a victim of the director's pacing and concept, not to mention the script he's handed. This could have been much better, right up there with the searing drama of "The Servant." Alas, it isn't.

Following their work on "The Servant" (1963) and before the more well-known, "The Go-Between" (1971), "Accident" can be seen as the best - certainly the most understated - of the collaborations between the English playwright, Harold Pinter, and the expatriate American director, Joseph Losey, who had lived and worked in London for some years.

As Pinter said in a 1966 interview: "So in this film everything is buried, it is implicit. There is really very little dialogue, and that is mostly trivial, meaningless. The drama goes on inside the characters." In the published screenplay his directions for one scene indicate that "the words are fragments of realistic conversation. They are not thoughts..." and what comes across is the brilliant contrast between the nondescript, mundane, day-to-day attempts at communication between the characters combined with a hard look at the underlying reality of the characters' situations. Nothing is like it seems to be.

If you like the work of Harold Pinter, this rarely-available film, is a brilliant addition. See it in combination with the other two to get a full picture of what Losey and Pinter achieved. I've seen the films at least 10 times each and they formed the basis of my 1974 MA thesis on the Pinter-Losey collaboration.

Watching this film again in 2010, it is amusing to see how much they smoked and drank. Students would arrive for tutorials and the professor would pour out a generous glass of the hard stuff or at least sherry. Stephen's pregnant wife takes an afternoon nap with a bottle of beer on the bedside table. Charley arrives for lunch carrying a couple of bottles of liquor, which gets consumed in the afternoon. Not surprisingly William ends up passing out face down in the salad! Anyone playing the drinking game and trying to keep up with the characters would be out cold halfway through the film.

Everything about the film was note perfect, with the exception of Jacqueline Sassard's stiff performance. Her character was supposed to be Austrian, so why did she try to look like an Italian starlet with that dreadful eye makeup. Perhaps they could not afford Gina Lollobridgida! Not only did she not look the part, but her voice was flat and harsh. I spent the movie wondering what on earth any of the men saw in her. If only they had used Marianne Faithful, who would have looked like an Austrian and given off an air of unattainability, at least until her affair with Charley was discovered.

I could not help feeling that if Anna had been written out altogether and the object of desire had been the beautiful William, played to perfection by Michael York, it might have been more interesting. Perhaps there was an subtle undercurrent which I missed. Filmmakers were not quite so obvious in 1966. Other than that, the wonderfully atmospheric film beautifully conveyed the long hot humid summer days of the south of England and the polite banter of the elite academics disguising an envious loathing of each other as they drank their way through the day.

40 years on I have never forgotten one little quote in the film by the provost who, upon hearing that a study into the sex habits of students at the University of Wisconsin revealed that 0.01% had intercourse during a lecture on Aristotle, remarked that he was surprised to find Aristotle on the syllabus in Wisconsin. With snappy one liners like that, how can you forget this film.

"Accident" was a somewhat ripe little novel by Nicholas Mosley about the sex lives of dons, (of the Oxbridge type rather than the Juan or Giovanni kind). It was a good book but hardly memorable. The film that Joseph Losey made of it, however, was a different kettle of rancid fish altogether. Harold Pinter wrote the script and it's a brilliant piece of work, as acerbic, as nasty and, by God, as intelligent as any of his celebrated theatre work and Losey's direction is pitch-perfect. Perhaps no writer and director were ever quite as in simpatico as Pinter and Losey. The film is told in flashback. It opens stunningly with the accident of the title that introduces us to three of the central characters; the driver of the car, the young woman with him and the don who finds them. The driver is a young Michael York, the girl is Jacqueline Sassard and the don is Dirk Bogarde, magnificent here in a performance as fine as his work in "The Servant" or "Death in Venice". The film then jumps back in time as we meet the other characters caught up in the sexual shenanigans; Stanley Baker as another don, raffish and full of bluster where Bogarde is introverted and ineffectual and Vivien Merchant as Bogarde's pregnant wife. They, too, are superb but then everyone, no matter how small their part, is superb; everyone is there for a reason. Primarily this is a film about sexual tension and unfulfilled desires, about petty jealousies and how all this sublimated sexual longing can lead to disaster. It is a film made up of long, virtuoso passages; a drunken Sunday lunch that turns into a drunken evening of recrimination and which brings all the main characters together, Bogarde's visit to an old flame, (Delphine Seyrig), a cricket match and, of course, the crash itself and it's aftermath which is, naturally, sexual. This is great film-making, quite rare in British cinema. Paradoxically the film is among the most English and, at the same time, among the least English of pictures. Superbly photographed, too, by Gerry Fisher and with another great Johnny Dankworth score this is a masterpiece.

After the titular "Accident" kills sexy young Michael York (as William), we flashback to the events leading up to his death. The exotically beautiful woman surviving the crash is Mr. York's fiancée Jacqueline Sassard (as Anna), an Austrian princess. Both she and York are students at Oxford, where Ms. Sassard arouses irresistible sexual interests from professors Dirk Bogarde (as Stephen) and Stanley Baker (as Charley). With legs up to there, Sassard was made for the shorter skirts popular in the 1960s, as you'll witness along with Mr. Bogarde, director Joseph Losey, and impressively promoted-to-photographer Gerry Fisher. The story mainly involves Bogarde succumbing to middle-age sexual angst...

The stark agony of forbidden desire is written on Bogarde's face...

It's almost too subtle in spots, but Mr. Losey and the crew take great care, and make visually beautiful film. Mr. and Mrs. Harold Pinter are obviously valuable participants. The performances are uniformly excellent, with Bogarde winning some "Best Actor" award consideration. York and Mr. Baker could have easily won "Newcomer" and "Supporting" awards. Baker's characterization is almost horrific. York went on to have a commendable career. Young Sassard makes a good impression; it's strange to see her career credits are so few. Losey and soundtrack composer Johnny Dankworth canoe in an aloof homage to Roman Polanski's "Knife in the Water" (1962), which seems entirely appropriate.

******* Accident (2/6/67) Joseph Losey ~ Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker, Jacqueline Sassard, Michael York

It's hard to believe that this script came from one of England's finest playwrights. The dialogue is so monosyllabic and kindergartenish that it's also hard to believe that the characters are members of academia. The actors go through their parts like zombies--you can drive a truck through the lines. Nobody seems to react to anyone else or anything else. the sexual attraction for the Austrian student can be explained only by the phrase zombie meets zombie. She opens her mouth and the result is embarrassment. She has the facial expressions of a patient shot full of novacaine and the body language of the Venus de Milo. The direction is pretentious, lackluster and uninspired. Like so many "art" films, the entire movie is overshot and overly long and, quite frankly, not only do I wonder why it was ever made but why most of those who have posted here seem to regard it as the greatest thing since buckwheat.

Not a lot happens, but we were glued to The Accident. The script is wonderfully understated. Pinter as screenplay writer is a different style from Pinter the playwright. Pinter teases us, though, with a small cameo performance of his own using almost mock-Pinter dialogue for that one short scene. Also of note script-wise is the scene soon after Pinter's scene when Dirk Bogarde visits his old flame in London and the dialogue is almost thoughts, almost dialogue - you don't see either of them actually speaking.

The cinematography on this movie is superb. Oxford in the summer is a soft target for beautiful shots, but this film fills its boots with that beauty. Yet the dark mood never leaves you despite the beauty - partly because 90% of the movie is a flashback, so you have already seen most of the tragedy unfold. Also, the behaviour of the two professors is just so awful. Dirk Bogarde comes across somewhat sympathetically because he is Dirk Bogarde, but the character is a more or less unmitigated toad. The Stanley Baker character is also horrible. The acting of all the main characters is superb.

This is high class stuff - seek it out.

Having loved Losey and Pinter's first film, The Servant, for its class commentary and Incredible portrayal of gradual emotional manipulation, I was optimistic for Accident, yet ultimately left disappointed.

Following three rivals competing over an Austrian student, empty conversations hide the turmoil and distrust under the surface of our leads interactions. Whilst the deliberately vapid dialogue did make the plot hard to follow and also delivered some awkward and weird reactions from the character, I didn't hate it all that much and can see how well some of the performances are in that regard. Despite little indication from the script you can figure out what insecurities are affecting Stephen and to an extent the other male leads from their body language and delivery of the scant dialogue.

For me however, the main flaw is the one dimensional nature of our male characters which ultimately makes them unrelatable. Their only motive seems to be getting the girl or out performing each other. Whilst the film does build tension surrounding this, there is little else to their characters. Their jobs and families hardly seem to be a concern and their single mindedness often makes them very dislikable, especially given how immorally some of them act.

The female characters on the other hand are really overlooked and would offer far more complexity and relatability. Anna's final actions are never explained and the film offers almost zero insight as to how she thinks and feels- in fact it's often the male characters telling us for her. Given she Has the most complex situation and that we are clearly told how the men think and feel, it just seems like an unfortunate case of the period's attitudes of depicting women as simple, dull and oblivious have won over here- even with an Oxford student.

Perhaps if she and others were included as fully fledged characters, the film's focus on the importance of characters true feelings underneath the meaningless conversations would carry more weight. As it is, it's just an embarrassing case of three oxford men, acting and thinking in the one way men supposedly do. Maybe Pinter was trying to critique the typical entitled Oxford Don, but I highly doubt it.

Though critically acclaimed for a reason, exiled director Joseph Losey is for myself a "hit and miss" filmmaker, whose output varies considerably in quality. He has made films that I really admire ("The Servant"), films I loathed ("The Romantic English Woman"), films I found underrated ("The Assassination of Trotsky") and films I found overrated ("Secret Ceremony"). In an ideal case this would mean, that at least he is never dull. But it is exactly dullness that plagues his poorer films, their introvert structure and motionless characters. His best works capture emotional turmoil even when the surface is tranquil, but his weaker entries are often mysterious in their meanings, or why somebody has decided to make said picture.

"Accident" is a film that divides the popular opinion. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and has been subsequently either hailed as a masterwork, or one of the director's lesser collaborations with his oft-used actors Bogarde and Baker. It is Losey's second collaboration with Nobel prize winning screenwriter Harold Pinter, after "The Servant" (1963). It is also based on a book by Nicholas Mosley, who later penned "The Assassination of Trotsky". It is an ambitious work, which I find to be visually interesting, even stimulating, but utterly mediocre as a narrative, or watching experience.

The film is told in flashback-form, possibly to reassure the public, that this artistic experiment actually does have an accident in it. Of course the title carries several meanings. Bogarde plays a university professor, who supervises two students: William (Michael York in his screen debut) and the exotic European beauty Anna (Jacqueline Sassard). Bogarde is rather chummy with both of them, and gradually forms a yearning for the girl, who is going to marry William. Baker plays Bogarde's friend, who also starts chasing after the girl.

The film is told largely from Bogarde's point of view. His character is going through a mid-life crisis, which Losey doesn't frame to subtly. Anna is something of a mysterious femme fatale, but the film really isn't going for a traditional narrative about the professor straying from the good path. Instead, it's a mood piece, an atmospheric work that tries to flesh out the psychology of the main character, his banal and dull existence, and his need for something more.

It's ambitious, but the execution does not work for me. All of the characters are kept at a distance, even when we are unnervingly close to them. Baker and York were not the least interesting, and the young woman is represented in a sexual, but one-sided way. Maybe the actress wasn't really right for the part either. Bogarde's performance is that of inner turmoil, but the screenplay isn't strong enough to give him enough to work with. Losey also directs the dialogue strangely, with long pauses, and makes the film feel stale.

Visually, there is merit to the film. I liked the opening shot, and especially the boat sequence, which really managed to build the tensions. Yet as a whole, this film is neither among Losey's best or worst for me.

If this wasn't a Pinter would it be remembered? The answer is yes - it was after all joint winner at Cannes of the second prize, the Grand Prix - but it would not be remembered to the same extent, and even then remembrance of this film is a minority sport.

There is the excellent acting of Jacqueline Sassard, as the protagonist who is not the protagonist, around whom the lives of all are affected by her present. A shame her film career was so short, one of many from that era who retired as an actress once they married (e.g. The well known Grace Kelly or the lesser known Virginia North). Dirk Bogarde too acts very well.

But time has not been kind to the film, which is a mixture of a college drama and a kitchen sink drama. The visuals, though very reminiscent of the Oxford college and the wonderful surrounding countryside, are dated. The film in parts is slow, but it is worth watching, if only because it is a Pinter / Bogarde / Sassard.

Accident is less watchable than an earlier Losey-Pinter-Bogarde collaboration The Servant. There isn't much dialogue and the plot is uneventful. Nearly the entire film is shown in flashback after a car accident leaves Oxford professor Bogarde's student-friend dead.

The film is based on a quadrangle of love-lust by two professors and one student for the same Austrian student. As we gradually learn, its not so hard to get her into bed - but she comes out as the only relatively sympathetic character. Neither of the professors comes out looking good - Stanley Baker being especially sleazy. Neither does Michael York as a student elicit any sympathy because of his cocky manner.

Bogarde is perhaps the only reason for continued interest in Accident. He gives another good, understated performance. He continues to show the kind of reserved character we see in The Servant with something more sinister brewing under the surface.

This is an highly intellectual (pretentious) drama screen written by Harold Pinter. Pinter is the master of the pregnant pause, allowing the characters to react in their own ways. Dirk Bogarde is quite good as the college professor who has created his own world. He fancies being the controller, but his shallowness betrays him. When the young people get into the accident, he portrays himself as sympathetic to the young female survivor. But he really abuses his situation. But ultimately, we have the work of a masterful modern playwright.

Joseph Losey was a talented director and in ACCIDENT (UK 1967) he was at the top of his game. Born in the US and forced to move to the UK because of Senator McCarthy's persecution of communists in Hollywood, Losey managed to acquire a very insightful perception of life in England, its class distinctions, and the looseness of such supposedly firm commitments as marriage, job, and friendship.

I cannot recall a single weak performance in any Dirk Bogarde's films, and in ACCIDENT he is as solid and intuitive as ever, his eyes alone conveying myriad feelings, sometimes contradictory ones. In his role as university lecturer, he is ably seconded by the gifted Vivien Merchant, as his wife. The reliable Stanley Baker, who plays a multi-skilled and more successful fellow lecturer, mirrors Bogarde's own life, to the point of having three children, too, and engaging in affairs with students - in this case with Anna, played by the beautiful Julie Sassard. The difference is that Baker is far more egotistical than Bogarde - but both men are vulnerable to temptation and have selfish moments.

Michael York and Sassard play the aristocrats in the film, and you can tell immediately that that sets them apart and, regardless of sexual ties, they will always remain separate from the rest of society. Contact with commoners is as inevitable as it is accidental - and it can be fatal.

Thought-provoking script and film, beautifully shot, leaves you wondering whether the accident at the end claimed the family dog. Well worth watching, if you are an introspective mood.

I had high hopes for this movie given the many bright lights involved in its making, especially Dirk Bogarde. Unfortunately, "Accident" did not live up to its promise. I found myself getting restless and fidgety as the characters laid their overeducated, upper-crust depravity on quite thickly in scene after scene. There's a lot of very heavy drinking and a lot of bed hopping here, with a dollop of death and a dash of spoofing the Oxford dons, but in the end it doesn't seem to amount to very much really...just a couple of middle-aged gents chasing the same skirt, that skirt being predictably much younger than themselves, while their wives are left to piece things together, or not, off on the sidelines. The fact that these middle-aged men succeed in their shared conquest of a girl half their age while their boyishly virile, handsome rival (Michael York) doesn't get any makes the whole premise rather implausible.

If I could rewrite this plot I'd have Dirk Bogarde's Stephen and Stanley Baker's Charley suddenly discover their suppressed lust for one another amidst their frustration in being bested by Michael York's William. Michael York would get the girl of everyone's dreams after many trials and tribulations and Bogarde and Baker would make beautiful gay music together. Scandalous...piquant...but alas it was not to be...

Pros: 1. Both Dirk Bogarde (Stephen) and Stanley Baker (Charley) give really good performances. 2. The cinematography is brilliant with some impressive shots and is visually stunning.

Cons: 1. The audio is far too loud at certain points and is poorly mixed at other points. 2. Some of the scenes are either needlessly inserted, or they last too long. 3. The dialogue sounds quite clunky and unnatural. At times, it also looks to be dubbed. 4. There are no likable or interesting characters. 5. The plot is not only too melodramatic, but it also seems to just sway incoherently from scene-to-scene. It doesn't help that the movie tries to follow a non-linear path. 6. The film is far too slow-paced, and it never feels justified. 7. The conflict between Charley, Stephen, and William (Michael York) over the affections of Anna (Jacqueline Sassard) is incredibly forced and poorly built-up to.

Accident is mesmerizing. Floating through the details of an appropriately Pinter-esque life, we are given a kind of psychological portrait in which we learn little more than what we can visually observe.

The most emblematic scene in the movie shows two people standing with their backs to us, leaning against a fence. One of them, just before the cut, breaks a twig from of the branch above him with a swift, almost violent motion. The movie itself keeps its back to us, refusing to yield its secrets while occasionally holding out before us strangely telling details.

The quiet narrative is punctuated by shots of cold, precise symbolic weight. Although they do not generally interrupt the pace, or shock us, they have a feeling of violence to them; shots of a house, tracking in extremely slowly until we hear the sound of a terrible car crash, or in which the camera moves, in close-up, between stone gargoyles to the beat of a cathedral bell hint at the ugliness behind the veneer of the character's lives. If nothing else, Accident is triumphant in its ability to convey a sense of existential rot that is somehow simultaneously hidden and apparent.

"Accident" (1967) is an interesting example of auterism, and a good antidote to the James Bond films or the "Carry On" series that largely dominated the British film market at the time. It's a unique, moody drama about middle-age alienation, depression, and delusion. Director Joseph Losey and screenwriter Harold Pinter break the time-space continuum years before Nicolas Roeg did. Dirk Bogarde is perfect for his role, as is Jacqueline Sassard as the object of affection, although I do wonder why they made her character Austrian instead of French like the actress is. And another buring question: were Oxford professors really paid THAT well in the 1960s? I mean, these guys seem to be better-off than the British Prime Minister! *** out of 4.