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Accident

  • 1967
  • Tous publics
  • 1h 45m
IMDb RATING
6.8/10
5.3K
YOUR RATING
Accident (1967)
Trailer for Accident
Play trailer2:17
2 Videos
66 Photos
Drama

A beautiful Austrian coed attending Oxford University is betrothed to a fellow student, but she ends up getting involved with two unhappily married professors instead.A beautiful Austrian coed attending Oxford University is betrothed to a fellow student, but she ends up getting involved with two unhappily married professors instead.A beautiful Austrian coed attending Oxford University is betrothed to a fellow student, but she ends up getting involved with two unhappily married professors instead.

  • Director
    • Joseph Losey
  • Writers
    • Nicholas Mosley
    • Harold Pinter
  • Stars
    • Dirk Bogarde
    • Stanley Baker
    • Jacqueline Sassard
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    6.8/10
    5.3K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Joseph Losey
    • Writers
      • Nicholas Mosley
      • Harold Pinter
    • Stars
      • Dirk Bogarde
      • Stanley Baker
      • Jacqueline Sassard
    • 63User reviews
    • 50Critic reviews
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Nominated for 4 BAFTA Awards
      • 5 wins & 9 nominations total

    Videos2

    Accident
    Trailer 2:17
    Accident
    Accident Trailer
    Trailer 2:16
    Accident Trailer
    Accident Trailer
    Trailer 2:16
    Accident Trailer

    Photos66

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    Top cast18

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    Dirk Bogarde
    Dirk Bogarde
    • Stephen
    Stanley Baker
    Stanley Baker
    • Charley
    Jacqueline Sassard
    Jacqueline Sassard
    • Anna
    Michael York
    Michael York
    • William
    Vivien Merchant
    Vivien Merchant
    • Rosalind
    Delphine Seyrig
    Delphine Seyrig
    • Francesca
    Alexander Knox
    Alexander Knox
    • Provost
    Ann Firbank
    Ann Firbank
    • Laura
    Brian Phelan
    • Police Sergeant
    Terence Rigby
    Terence Rigby
    • Plain Clothed Policeman
    Freddie Jones
    Freddie Jones
    • Man in Bell's Office
    Jill Johnson
    • Secretary
    Jane Hillary
    • Receptionist
    Maxwell Caulfield
    Maxwell Caulfield
    • Ted
    • (as Maxwell Findlater)
    Carole Caplin
    Carole Caplin
    • Clarissa
    Harold Pinter
    Harold Pinter
    • Bell - TV Producer
    Nicholas Mosley
    • Don Hedges
    Steven Easton
    • Stephen & Rosalind's baby
    • (uncredited)
    • Director
      • Joseph Losey
    • Writers
      • Nicholas Mosley
      • Harold Pinter
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews63

    6.85.2K
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    Featured reviews

    8cafescott

    Double Entendre

    ***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.
    8st-shot

    Accident keeps its distance.

    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.
    10johnwebber

    The best of the 3 Losey-Pinter collaborations

    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.
    7emuir-1

    Don't try to match them drink for drink!

    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.
    7blanche-2

    Another Bogarde-Losey-Pinter collaboration

    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.

    Storyline

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    Did you know

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    • Trivia
      Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter were keen to make a film out of Nicholas Mosley's novel, but knew it would have to be a low-budget, intimate drama and that it would be difficult to find funding for it. Losey was certain that his friend and frequent collaborator Sir Dirk Bogarde would be the best casting for the role of "Stephen." When the famous producer Sam Spiegel expressed an interest in making the film, Losey and Pinter were tempted, because they knew he could find the money for it; but Losey was also cautious, having known and worked with Spiegel before, and also knowing that he liked to dominate his directors and impose himself on them. He was also sure that Spiegel was now only interested in lavish prestige productions. Sure enough, Spiegel insisted on hiring Richard Burton, then the highest-paid and most famous male film star in the world, to play "Stephen," hinting that, with Burton involved, an all-star cast could be obtained, and also making disturbing noises about the film becoming "more commercial". He invited Losey aboard his famous 378-foot yacht to discuss the film, and it was aboard this yacht, in the middle of the Mediterranean, that Spiegel offered Losey one of his special eight-inch cigars, which were prepared exclusively for him and which cost (in 1966) about £12 each (around £175-£200 in 2021 money). Losey, a non-smoker, accepted the cigar, made an elaborate show of piercing and lighting it, took two puffs and then threw it overboard, claiming it was "too dry." Furious, Spiegel immediately withdrew from the project and Losey was left free to make the small-scale film he wanted to make.
    • Goofs
      The Anna character is meant to be Austrian, but speaks with a (Jacqueline Sassard's native) French accent.
    • Quotes

      Charley: [reading from learned journal] A statistical analysis of sexual intercourse at Colenso University, Milwaukee, showed that 70% did it in the evening, 29.9% between 2 and 4 in the afternoon and 0.1% during a lecture on Aristotle.

      Provost: I'm surprised to hear that Aristotle is on the syllabus in the State of Wisconsin.

    • Alternate versions
      Accident (1967) was restored by the British Film Institute in 2009 to celebrate the centenary of Joseph Losey.
    • Connections
      Featured in Hollywood U.K. British Cinema in the Sixties: A Very British Picture (1993)

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    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • June 7, 1967 (France)
    • Country of origin
      • United Kingdom
    • Language
      • English
    • Also known as
      • Accident - Zwischenfall in Oxford
    • Filming locations
      • Syon House, Syon Park, Brentford, Middlesex, England, UK
    • Production company
      • Royal Avenue Chelsea
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

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    • Budget
      • £272,811 (estimated)
    • Gross US & Canada
      • $17,161
    • Opening weekend US & Canada
      • $5,798
      • May 25, 2014
    • Gross worldwide
      • $65,615
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Tech specs

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    • Runtime
      • 1h 45m(105 min)
    • Sound mix
      • Mono
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.85 : 1

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