Accident

Accident

Losey establishes the mood with soft performances and a hush-hush camera. After they go, his camera likes to stay on places that suggest their world is not as passive as it seems. It works because of the careful, controlled performances by the lead actors.

The story involves two Oxford professors. One is an extrovert (Stanley Baker) whose wife has left him; the other is a silent, repressed married man (Dirk Bogarde) whose wife is pregnant again. Both men are attracted to a young Austrian student (Jacqueline Sassard), who is engaged to Bogarde’s student (Michael York). He would like to speak to her, but does not he says in deference to York. Not Baker: He picks up the girl and even takes her around to Bogarde’s one night for a little.

That’s the plot, which saves its interest for Bogarde’s beautifully calculated moves against Baker that will win him the girl and incidentally settle their undeclared war. The “accident” of the title comes before his victory.

The film is made with Hitchcockian care; its mechanisms depend on coincidences, timing and what can be done with limited means in Oxford. But it is also recognizably Pinteresque in that it tells its story backwards, putting together scenes like a jigsaw puzzle so that there is an emotional continuity instead of a straight line.

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