Stephen, a married Oxford tutor in his forties, has two students: the rich and likeable William, of whom he is fond, and a beautiful, enigmatic Austrian named Anna, whom he secretly covets. William also fancies Anna and hopes to know her better. While his wife is away having their third child, Stephen looks up an old flame in London and they sleep together. Returning home, he finds that his pushy colleague Charley has been using the house for sex with Anna. She tells Stephen privately that she and William are engaged to be married.
William says that he will come to Stephen's house after a party that night. As he is too drunk to drive, Anna takes the wheel, but she crashes the car outside Stephen's gate. Upon finding the accident and William dead, Stephen pulls the deeply shaken Anna from the wreckage and hides her upstairs while he calls the police. Later, he forces himself on her while she is still in shock, then takes her back to her room at the university. He comes by in the morning to find a bemused Charley, who cannot prevent Anna from packing to return to Austria.[10][11]
Steven Easton as Baby, Stephen and Rosalind's baby
Cast notes
Losey makes a cameo appearance in the film, and Pinter has a brief speaking role as the television producer, Mr. Bell.[13]
Reception
In his review upon the film's release, New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called Accident "a sad little story of a wistful don ... neither strong drama nor stinging satire."[14]
Responding to criticism that the film's meaning was difficult to discern, Stanley Baker said: "It's obvious what Accident meant ... It meant what was shown on the screen." Of Joseph Losey's direction, Baker said: "One of Joe's problems is that he tends to wrap things up too much for himself. I think that 75% of the audience didn't realise that Accident was a flashback."[15]
The film performed poorly at the box office.[16] In 1973, Losey said the film was "officially in bankruptcy."[17]
Perhaps the most celebrated sequence in the movie, comprising 25 minutes of the 105 minute film, is set at Stephen and Rosiland's home on a Sunday afternoon. Anna and William are the invited guests, but Charley intrudes on the company unexpectedly.[19] A tennis doubles tennis match is arranged—Stephen and Charley vs. William and Anna—in which Losey reveals, cinematically, the undercurrents of sexual tension among the three men.[20][21][22] Film critic Robert Maris writes:
As in Pinter's plays, the dialogue is often mundane, but conversations are usually loaded with menacing implications or punctuated by lengthy silences. One scene, involving a doubles tennis match, is so laden with psychological tension and jealousy—with piercing glances across the court or a ball hit at an opponent a little too hard—that it seems less a tennis match than some sort of sexual game.[23]
Film critics James Palmer and Michael Riley cite the dialogue from the "deceptively casual, languid scene on the lawn" which follows the tennis match, serving as "a paradigm of reflexive storytelling."[24]
Charley, Stephen's academic colleague, challenges literature student William to create a omniscient narrative for characters in a novel, based on those attending the gathering:
CHARLEY. - Describe what we're all doing. (WILLIAM looks around the garden.)
WILLIAM. ''Rosalind's lying down. Stephen's weeding the garden. Anna's making a daisy chain.
CHARLEY. Good. But you could go further. Rosalind is pregnant. Stephen's having an affair with a girl at Oxford. He's reached the age where he can't keep his hands off the girls at Oxford.
WILLIAM. What?
CHARLEY. But he feels guilty, of course. So he makes up a story.
WILLIAM. What story?
CHARLEY. This story.
WILLIAM. What are you talking about? (CHARLEY sits up and swats violently at flies.)
CHARLEY. Oh, these flies are terrible.
WILLIAM. What flies? There aren't any flies.
CHARLEY. They're Sicilian horse flies, from Corsica. (CHARLEY shouts across the lawn.) Have you heard our conversation? (STEPHEN weeding).
STEPHEN. Yes! ROSILAND lying, eyes closed.
ROSILAND.Yes
ANNA carefully places daisy chain around CLARISSA’s neck (Rosalind's daughter).[25][26]
Film critic Dan Callahan at Senses of Cinema registers this assessment of Losey's second film collaboration with playwright Harold Pinter:
Accident, though revered by many critics, is a self-conscious art film with a sexy veneer—it evaporates off the screen. Everything about it is oblique, glancing and empty.[27]
Footnotes
^Edith de Rham, Joseph Losey, André Deutsch, 1991, p. 180.
^ abcCaute, David (1994). Joseph Losey. Oxford University Press. p. 204.
^Chapman, J. (2022). The Money Behind the Screen: A History of British Film Finance, 1945-1985. Edinburgh University Press, p. 360, gives the figure as £281,555.
^Hirsch, 1980 p. 92: “Losey’s three films with Pinter - The Servant, Accident, The Go-Between…” Callahan, 2003: “Harold Pinter, who wrote three screenplays for the director, the first of which was The Servant…”
^Hirsch, 1980 p. 92: “Accident is the most subdued of the trio, a miniaturist examination of middle-aged malaise.” Gardner, 2001: “Losey's best film, Accident (1967).”
^Hirsch, 1980 p. 52: On the story as a “flashback” And pp. 113-115: Plot summary.
Gale, Steven H. (2003) Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter's Screenplays and the Artistic Process, Lexington, Kentucky: The UP of Kentucky, ISBN0-8131-2244-9 (10) ISBN978-0-8131-2244-1 (13)
