You won't be disappointed!

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Too much about the plot just didn't add up, the writing was bad, some of the scenes were cringey and awkward,

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

***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.

This film throws the morals straight out of the window and I love it for it. Clearly a rather artistic films. Losey does a lot of stuff not common at the time nor since. There's a great deal of stuff that in a way reminds me of Godard and Resnais in this one, though it's far away from a rip-off, it was really more in mood and spirit.The plot starts out with a car accident and the protagonist played by the fabulous Dirk Bogarde discovers it. From that we see the leading events which could be taken as a sort of satire or more so criticism of the uk moral system. Subtle in a non-subtle way would be the best way to explain this film it's slow but trippy and has large underlaying sexual themes.An odd peculiarity I must say. My first from Losey, I expect to see lots more.

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.

In the last week I've seen two great films from 1967, having seen 'Bonnie and Clyde' first, which has a terrific pace even by today's standards, and then seeing 'Accident', gave a good contrast on many levels...one being the opposite sides of the Atlantic.Besides the obvious merits of 'Accident', I really loved the period, the emerging Britsh sense of style and that early start to the loosening up in which the Beattle played such a large role.I particularly like Bograrde's portrayal of the professor and it kept reminding me of his celebrated role in 'Death in Venice'...one of my top ten films of all times.