Nayan Gough
A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.
Skyler
Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.
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.
Claudio Carvalho
The Oxford professor of philosophy Stephen (Dirk Bogarde) has two favorite pupils, the athletic aristocrat William (Michael York) and the Austrian Anna von Graz (Jacqueline Sassard). Stephen is a frustrated man, with a negligent wife, Rosalind (Vivien Merchant), who is pregnant of their third child, and is envious of the Oxford professor Charley (Stanley Baker) that has a television show. Stephen feels attracted to Anna, but William woos her and she becomes his girlfriend. Charley has a love affair with Anna but when William dies in a car accident, she leaves Oxford to return to her home town."Accident" is a deceptive and pointless movie directed by Joseph Losey. Dick Bogarde has an astonishing performance in the role of an insecure man, but it is hard to understand why he keeps his close "friendhip" with Charley. There is a sexual tension along the movie but the result is disappointing. My vote is five.Title (Brazil): "Estranho Acidente" ("Strange Accident")
Martin Bradley
"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.
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.
