good back-story, and good acting

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

"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.

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.

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.