Accident (1967)

"That's because you are an aristocrat. All aristocrats are made to be... killed."

‘Oxford’s dreaming spires…’

Wednesday’s dip into the WEEKEND FLICKS. archive continues with Joseph Losey’s Accident (1967), starring Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker and Jacqueline Sassard. Dirk reckoned it was his best film, or at least his best performance. Difficult one that, as we’re up against The Servant (1963), Darling (1965) and Death in Venice (1970). Still, if we’re going to play the ‘best’ game, Accident (1967) has to be one of Losey’s greatest achievements…

The late 1960s and early 1970s were extraordinary times for British cinema. An extension, perhaps, of what critics like to call the British New Wave. From Blow-Up (1966), Michelangelo Antonioni’s exposé of Swinging London, and Lindsay Anderson’s surreal public school satire, If.... (1967), to Nicolas Roeg’s seminal masterpieces, Walkabout (1971) and Don’t Look Now (1973): all four films are masterclasses in editing and direction. It’s one of my favourite periods in cinema.

Which brings us to Accident (1967), based on the novel by Nicholas Mosley (son of Sir Oswald), directed by Joseph Losey and starring Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker, Michael York and French actress Jacqueline Sassard. Harold Pinter wrote the script. The Losey-Pinter collaboration is a fine thing, resulting in three films: The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971) — which, from memory, Dirk Bogarde might well have appeared in, if he had been available at the time. It’s one of the ‘what-ifs’ of British film history.

‘Jacqueline Sassard: a girl of extraordinary beauty…’

I spent yesterday afternoon watching Accident (it’s available on Amazon Prime Video), and I can tell you one thing. It’s about sex, or more accurately, plain, shallow, good old-fashioned lust. Dirk’s a cardigan-clad forty-something Oxford don. His friend — or more accurately rival — is a fellow academic, played by the pugnacious Stanley Baker, who’s a little bit younger, a little bit fitter, with a burgeoning career as a television don and a white Lotus Elan. Michael York’s an aristocratic Oxford undergraduate, ironically a born survivor as aristocrats tend to be. And all three of ‘em have the hots for international dolly-bird, Jacqueline Sassard, York’s fellow undergraduate: an Austrian princess with an unpronounceable name, a girl of extraordinary beauty; a ‘How d’You Say’ Euro bimbo with the English vocabulary of a Transylvanian newt:

“She’s talking to the goat… they speak German.”

Understandably, this has been the source of some contention. The one-dimensional characterisation. My understanding is this: Jacqueline Sassard’s English language skills — through no fault of her own — were, at that time, decidedly dodgy. Put it this way, she wasn’t exactly a walking Roget’s Thesaurus. This was her first British picture. But it works. I think. In the context of the film, seen from the point of view of the three male characters. The boys are after her body, are they not? It's as simple as that. It’s desperately shallow. For them, an afternoon in the sack holds a greater appeal than a drowsy afternoon in a punt reading Proust or reciting Keats.

‘Jealousy and resentment: the hell of an English Sunday afternoon…’

Losey sets his love triangle, or more accurately, love rectangle, against the dreaming spires of Oxford, with Dirk’s red-bricked Georgian rectory filmed, actually, in Surrey, standing in for Oxfordshire. Losey has a terrific sense of place. His use of sound: the suck of a jet airliner overhead, the whistle of a shunting steam engine, the tick of a clock or the drip of a tap; schoolchildren in a playground, sound bouncing off the tarmac. Without giving too much away, the car accident itself (rather gruesome) takes place in bizarre light: a luminous witches’ Warlpurgisnacht; clouds scudding across a full moon — the dog that barked in the night.

‘The thin bat’s squeak of sexuality…’

Which brings us to the English Sunday. I’m not keen on the English Sunday lunch, especially parties held by intellectual types in Hampstead or Oxford: languid, humid affairs, spiralling into drunken depression, stupor and resentment; the humidity of a late August. As an American outsider, Losey understood the English — and our ways — only too well. We say something and mean the opposite. And so in Accident (1967), he recreates an academic’s summer lunch party to perfection: wasps zip around the Jekyll borders, and as the Oxfordshire afternoon advances and shadows lengthen, conversation turns slurred and spiky; bitterness masked by English civility.

‘The English penchant for games: ruthlessness masked by civility…’

And alongside the sex and the lust, Accident (1967) is also a film about repressed jealousy and resentment. Losey is obsessed with the English class system, especially our penchant for games. Ruthlessness (The East India Company, Perfidious Albion) camouflaged by cricket, tea and biscuits. The vicious Eton Wall Game sequence, filmed in the Great Hall at Syon, is very much a Losey set piece, separating the middle-class Stephen (Bogarde) from the upper-class guests in manner, thought and deed. Oh, subtle stuff! In a wonderful sequence, Dirk takes Jacqueline for a walk in the Oxfordshire countryside (distant spires and Stephen Spender’s electricity pylons) and attempts to seduce her. Except that he doesn’t: Evelyn Waugh’s thin bat’s squeak of sexuality. It’s painful to watch. Cloud shadows race across the flat wheat-fields in the dappled sunlight, and the faint sound of Oxford’s bells is caught on the wind.

I watched Accident (1967) on Amazon Prime Video. It’s also available on DVD and Blu-Ray, including an excellent ‘fully restored’ version from Studiocanal.

I hope you enjoyed this review. For the paid subscribers, I post a film recommendation every Friday morning (London time), and a paid subscription also gives full access to the WEEKEND FLICKS. archive. Over time, this should build up into an invaluable resource. Currently, there are well over 200 film recommendations. For the free subscribers, there’s a newsletter every Sunday morning: posted alongside a strong dose of inspiration and a large cup of black coffee. A Weekend Double Bill, if you will. So please join me over the coming weeks and months. It’s going to be fun.

What else? I’m also working on audio voice-overs, and there have been two podcasts. So far.

And a BIG thank you to all those of you who have signed up. I really appreciate it. Honestly, the holes in my socks worry me. And it would be nice to turn on the gas every once in a while. It costs a modest £5 a month, or £50 a year, which I reckon (maths was never my strong point) works out at approximately 96p per film (if you go for the yearly £50 option). A genuine bargain.

Enjoy Accident (1967). It’s marvellously understated. Claret for this one, or a donnish port…