Accident - Zwischenfall in Oxford

***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.

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.

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.

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.

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.