Director: Joseph Losey
Screenplay: Harold Pinter
Starring: Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker, Jacqueline Sassard
Country: United Kingdom
Running Time: 105 minutes
Year: 1967
BBFC Certificate: 15
The films of Joseph Losey, often maligned or misunderstood upon their original release, have undergone a much-needed critical reappraisal in recent decades. His most celebrated films such as The Servant and The Go Between have always been lauded for their formal brilliance and emotional resonance. Even his lesser-known genre works like The Criminal and The Damned have been favourably reassessed. However, his 1967 feature Accident has had to wait far longer to find an appreciative audience. The second of Losey’s collaborations with the playwright Harold Pinter, the film might just be Losey’s best.
The film begins in uncompromising fashion. We see a beautiful house in the country, and then we hear the horrific sound of a car crashing. A man rushes to the scene to find a young man dead, and a young woman dazed but seemingly unhurt. The man carries the woman into the house, and as he gazes down upon her, remembers how he came to meet her in the first place. The horror of this opening scene is even more jarring when the film jumps backwards, bringing back to life the young man we have literally just seen lying dead amidst the wreckage. William (portrayed by Michael York, in just his third screen role) is a student at Oxford, in the middle of a tutorial with Stephen, a philosophy don portrayed by the estimable Dirk Bogarde. Both are already fixated on Anna (Jacqueline Sassard), an Austrian princess whose poise and beauty are seen as a prize to be won rather belonging to a woman with her own agency. It is Stephen’s obsession with Anna that precipitates a sequence of events that will culminate in the event we have already witnessed.
Adapted from a novel by Nicholas Mosley (son of the notorious British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley), Accident is a devastating indictment of male midlife crisis and the British class system, made at a time when those age-old ‘values’ were under serious attack. One of those attackers was Harold Pinter, and his superlative screenplay unleashes a level of underlying spite and vitriol contained only by the code of bourgeois manners that seem to keep everyone in line. Appearances are everything, but beneath the surface of each character a cauldron threatens to boil over. Dirk Bogarde is spectacular as the apparently supine Stephen, the academic with everything in his possession that symbolizes prosperity – career, house, wife, children – and yet his longing for more, for something else is all-consuming. He is the classic man aged before his time in the face of a gilded youth like William. He is also engaged in a permanent life of competition with his best friend Charley, played with real panache by the great Stanley Baker. Their onscreen antagonism was more than matched by their real-life enmity, which bleeds into every scene they share.
There are few actors who can, with one flicker of expression, convey a sense of absolute disgust as Bogarde. In Accident, he is at his querulous best; licking food from a corner of his mouth, cooking an omelette as if it were an act of self-abasement, carrying an umbrella even at the height of summer. A man lost to shadow desiring the light. Charley is more extrovert and robust, more successful than Stephen, his sexual prowess unquestioned but deeply resented. When Stephen attempts to meet Charley’s television producer, the meeting is farcical. Pinter’s cameo is a delight; the way he delivers the line ‘the daughter of the provost’ is absolutely hilarious, with Freddie Jones’ fractious appearance adding yet another layer of absurdity to this remarkable scene.
The female characters are only granted limited space to make their mark. They are either idealized or pushed to the margins of the narrative. This is intentional by Losey and Pinter, giving what they do say genuine power. This is especially true of Anna, whose true motives are always hidden. Jacqueline Sassard’s performance as Anna is purposefully ambiguous, dividing her attentions between the various men with a freedom and ease that is beyond those who merely lust after her. When Stephen discovers the affair between Anna and Charley (in his own house, no less), she appears headless on the stairs, her face cast in shadow. As Francesca, Delphine Seyrig doesn’t speak at all, her dialogue with Stephen exists only in voiceover in one of the most daring sequences of the entire film. Her presence as pure star power is the most important factor here. Incidentally, keep your eyes open for the posters in the restaurant; they have to be seen to be believed. The character that really cuts through is Stephen’s pregnant wife Rosalind, played by Vivien Merchant. Her acutely measured performance is one of the film’s highpoints, unleashing some of Pinter’s most vociferous lines of dialogue.
The climactic scenes involving Anna and Stephen are as shocking and uncomfortable today as they surely were to audiences at the time. They display the depths to which our protagonist will sink to. There is an ugliness and brutality at the heart of this man which few actors could ever bring forth, and it is a testament to Losey and to Pinter, but above all Bogarde that he appears human, with all his flaws, rather than a monster. With an arthouse sensibility that transcends pretty much everything made at that time, Accident is unquestionably one of the great British masterpieces of the 1960s
EXTRAS
32-page booklet
NEW – Course Collision: Pamela Hutchinson on Accident
NEW- Starting by Accident: An Interview with dialogue coach Claire Davidson
NEW – Maxwell Caulfield interviewed by Michael Billington
Audio commentary by Kat Ellinger
John Coldstream on Dirk Bogarde
Interview with Harold Pinter expert Harry Burton
Interview with feminist author and academic Melanie Williams
Interview with film critic Tim Robey
Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter discuss Accident (1957)
Behind the Scenes Stills gallery
Colour Lobby Cards gallery
Trailer
Many of the special features on this blu ray have been ported over from Studiocanal’s previous DVD release, but there lots of new features to luxuriate in as well. I am familiar with the contributions by Harry Burton, John Coldstream, Tim Robey and Melanie Williams from that disc; all of them make excellent and incisive points about the life and works of Losey and Pinter. In her interview, Melanie Williams does make reference to the Bechdel Test in her interview. For me, that test works best as an injunction to film-makers to make significant improvements with regard to female representation onscreen. Accident fails the test precisely because the female characters are deliberately excluded, and the misogyny on display is what the film is both examining and interrogating. However, there is one small scene that is easy to overlook, where Anna and Rosalind take a walk together. I like to think that they talk about something other than the men in their lives during that afternoon stroll.
The new special features are a treasure trove of information about the film. Most noteworthy from the production itself are dialogue coach Claire Davidson’s memories of working with Jacqueline Sassard, and Maxwell Caulfield’s memories of the filming itself. For Davidson, Accident was the beginning of a long and distinguished career. She speaks with perfect diction and clearly has fond memories of her time working with Losey, and particularly Bogarde. In Caulfield’s case it was pure luck that he got the small role; his mother briefly worked for Pinter as his secretary. Given that he is billed as ‘Maxwell Findlater’, I would never have guessed that he was cast in the film at all.
The archive interview with Losey and Pinter from the US culture programme Camera 3 is a superb extra, with the host James Macandrew asking probing but respectful questions, and receiving some very enlightening responses from both men. At one point during the discussion, Pinter begins to read from a racist flyer handed to them on the streets the previous day (I imagine from a group like the John Birch Society), which both Losey and Pinter unequivocally condemn in no uncertain terms. My respect for both men grew immeasurably after seeing that.
Pamela Hutchinson’s contributions are authoritative and provide excellent background context, giving her own forthright opinions of the characters and the film itself. At one point she describes Anna as ‘monstrous’, which is not unreasonable given that the first thing we see her do is put her stiletto heel on Michael York’s face whilst climbing out of the car. I fully agree with her assessment that Accident is the best of the three cinematic collaborations between Losey and Pinter.
The commentary by Kat Ellinger is absolutely superb. I always appreciate the way that Ellinger foregrounds her own feelings about a film before expanding on the themes and wider issues. It is great to know that she was as startled by Accident on her on first viewing as I was. She describes Losey and Pinter as ‘keen observers of human nature’, and likens Accident’s alienated atmosphere to those made by the likes of Claude Chabrol rather than any of the trends of British cinema at that time. Her wry incomprehension in the face of middle-class sporting rites and rituals like cricket and rugby union is a humorous admission.
The booklet accompanying this release was sadly unavailable for this review.
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