Accident - Zwischenfall in Oxford

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.

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.

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.

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

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.