Very disappointing...

Touches You

Simply Perfect

Good concept, poorly executed.

I had high hopes for this movie given the many bright lights involved in its making, especially Dirk Bogarde. Unfortunately, "Accident" did not live up to its promise. I found myself getting restless and fidgety as the characters laid their overeducated, upper-crust depravity on quite thickly in scene after scene. There's a lot of very heavy drinking and a lot of bed hopping here, with a dollop of death and a dash of spoofing the Oxford dons, but in the end it doesn't seem to amount to very much really...just a couple of middle-aged gents chasing the same skirt, that skirt being predictably much younger than themselves, while their wives are left to piece things together, or not, off on the sidelines. The fact that these middle-aged men succeed in their shared conquest of a girl half their age while their boyishly virile, handsome rival (Michael York) doesn't get any makes the whole premise rather implausible.If I could rewrite this plot I'd have Dirk Bogarde's Stephen and Stanley Baker's Charley suddenly discover their suppressed lust for one another amidst their frustration in being bested by Michael York's William. Michael York would get the girl of everyone's dreams after many trials and tribulations and Bogarde and Baker would make beautiful gay music together. Scandalous...piquant...but alas it was not to be...

After the titular "Accident" kills sexy young Michael York (as William), we flashback to the events leading up to his death. The exotically beautiful woman surviving the crash is Mr. York's fiancée Jacqueline Sassard (as Anna), an Austrian princess. Both she and York are students at Oxford, where Ms. Sassard arouses irresistible sexual interests from professors Dirk Bogarde (as Stephen) and Stanley Baker (as Charley). With legs up to there, Sassard was made for the shorter skirts popular in the 1960s, as you'll witness along with Mr. Bogarde, director Joseph Losey, and impressively promoted-to-photographer Gerry Fisher. The story mainly involves Bogarde succumbing to middle-age sexual angst...The stark agony of forbidden desire is written on Bogarde's face...It's almost too subtle in spots, but Mr. Losey and the crew take great care, and make visually beautiful film. Mr. and Mrs. Harold Pinter are obviously valuable participants. The performances are uniformly excellent, with Bogarde winning some "Best Actor" award consideration. York and Mr. Baker could have easily won "Newcomer" and "Supporting" awards. Baker's characterization is almost horrific. York went on to have a commendable career. Young Sassard makes a good impression; it's strange to see her career credits are so few. Losey and soundtrack composer Johnny Dankworth canoe in an aloof homage to Roman Polanski's "Knife in the Water" (1962), which seems entirely appropriate.******* Accident (2/6/67) Joseph Losey ~ Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker, Jacqueline Sassard, Michael York

If "anyone with a soul can't fail to appreciate this picture", then I can state categorically that I have no soul.It's rarely that I'm tempted to walk out of a picture during performance, but in this case I was. (I noticed that a fellow member of the audience actually did exit part-way through; the woman next to me kept checking the time on her mobile phone, to which I really couldn't complain, as I had already done the same on my wristwatch...) My rating above is as high as it is solely on the grounds of "Accident"'s critical acclaim -- surely it must be doing something right that I simply can't see..? I wasn't expecting a feel-good film from what little I'd heard about it, but I did expect something with emotional impact: a searing tragedy or a bitterly ironic script. The last thing I expected was tedium coupled with confusion, but that was what I got. Characters whom I alternately disliked and was left cold by, undertaking activities which I found distasteful on those occasions that I could actually understand them. Everybody hates everyone else (as the programme notes announced with an air of approval when I read them later). Everything happens at great and inconsequential length. The one famous line, "You're standing on his face!", occurs within a few minutes of the start.The montage of unexplained sounds over the opening credits is more or less symptomatic of the whole film in its presumed intent to be deeply significant (and its ultimate result of confusion and alienation) -- we hear a typewriter, although none is ever seen in the house shown, an apparently irrelevant aeroplane, engine noises which with hindsight presumably belong to the road later revealed to be located just behind the camera, and what sounds for all the world like a passing steam train. The latter sound continues, inexplicably, throughout Dirk Bogarde's walk along the roadside towards the crash, waxing and waning as he confronts the injured girl.By the end of the film, I found that I simply didn't care who did what to whom -- I had lost the ability to be shocked or even interested, due to the total lack of sympathetic characters -- I just wanted them to get on with it. It got to the stage where I was actively pretending that I was watching a silent film and trying to see if it made any more sense that way, if one watched the body language and totally ignored the dialogue: perhaps this was Pinter's intent.I'm afraid I would actively pay not to have to watch this film again. I felt particularly short-changed, I suppose, due to having been promised a masterpiece -- no doubt that will teach me my lesson for daring to watch a picture made after 1960 :-)

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.