Paul Kydd
Available on Blu-ray Disc (Region B)UK 1967 English (Colour); Drama/Mystery (London Independent); 105 minutes (PG certificate)Crew includes: Joseph Losey (Director); Harold Pinter (Screenwriter, adapting Novel by Nicholas Mosley **½ [5/10]); Joseph Losey, Norman Priggen (Producers); Gerry Fisher (Cinematographer); Carmen Dillon (Art Director); Reginald Beck (Editor); John Dankworth (Composer)Cast includes: Dirk Bogarde (Stephen), Stanley Baker (Charley), Jacqueline Sassard (Anna), Michael York (William), Vivien Merchant (Rosalind), Delphine Seyrig (Francesca), Alexander Knox (Provost); Harold Pinter (Bell)BAFTA nominations (4): British Film, British Actor (Bogarde), British Screenplay, British Art Direction - Colour; Golden Globe nomination: Foreign Film - English Language"The story of a love triangle... and the four people trapped in it!"An emotionally suppressed, Oxford University don (Bogarde) vies with a more successful (in life) academic colleague (Baker) for the affections of an exotic, icy student (Sassard), who survives a car accident that kills his favourite male tutee (York).Second (and finest) of three collaborations between American director Losey and English playwright Pinter (briefly seen as a TV producer) takes a dim view of human nature and what cruel, selfish acts we are capable of, regardless of surface beauty and propriety.Following his '50s emergence as a matinée idol, one of Bogarde's intellectual, grown-up dramas, during which he and Baker (total opposites) did not get along, thus aiding their on-screen rancour.Blu-ray Extras: Documentary, Interviews, Trailer. *** (6/10)
Leofwine_draca
ACCIDENT is a slow and staged conversation piece written by Harold Pinter. If you like highbrow intellectual discussion and the like then you might enjoy it although I found that it barely registered as a movie. The film features two fine actors, Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker, playing rival professors who just so happen to be sleeping with the same girl. Much is made of the opening car accident scene and the film strives hard to work up an air of mystery regarding the events surrounding it, but I found it all largely uninteresting and trivial. The characters are unlikeable across the board and the film's continuing attempts to be highbrow and artistic make it a real bore to sit through. When the subject matter is something as unimportant and uninteresting as affairs then it all feels very lacklustre.
emuir-1
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.
ianlouisiana
By 1967 the Swinging Sixties had officially been declared open and artists,pop singers,actors and other self - styled "creative" types found themselves in the avant garde of a movement of exquisitely silly pomposity whereby their every action was endowed with a significance far beyond it's worth and their excesses were indulged as the due of "greatness",a word that was bandied freely about,especially by the aforementioned artists,pop singers and actors.Mr J. Losey's film "Accident",along with "Blow - up" and "The Knack" is at the apogee of this movement.A collaboration with the equally self - regarding Mr H.Pinter,idol of the chattering classes,it solemnly progresses to precisely nowhere with excruciatingly pretentious indifference towards its audience all of which,it presumes,are struck with awe at its coruscating brilliance. Well,all but one maybe.Everybody in it is terribly clever of course,far more so than you or I,so,by extension,what they say must also be terribly clever and if it seems frankly pretty boring then the fault must be in ourselves,not in the Stars (ie Messrs Baker,Bogarde and Yorke who manage to look quite serious throughout). For all his manifest faults I feel myself in agreement with Herman Goering who is noted for saying "When I hear the word "culture" I want to reach for my revolver".When I hear the word "Accident" I want to reach for the remote.
AD
