Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Kaydan Christian A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Matylda Swan It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

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.

st-shot Late one evening in the English countryside two inebriated students on their way to visit Stephen (Dirk Bogarde) an Oxford professor who has been tutoring both, crash the car they are in killing the male ( Michael York). Stephen pulls Anna (Jaqueline Sassard)from the wreck and then possibly covers up for her part. The story then moves backwards in objective and dispassionate detail that first brings them and others together before the climax returns you with a group of facts to assess your own feelings about each character as the film plays itself out. Accident is one cold and remote study of human behavior even for English academia. Director Joseph Losey and writer Harold Pinter erase any hints of compassion and understanding while ironically rendering men of vast knowledge non communicative to intimates as they try to come to terms with their own repressed desires. Bogarde is tailor maid to play Stephen. Defrosting little from his character in The Servant created by the same team he remains in a perpetual dark night of the soul even during moments of bliss. Fellow prof Charley ( Stanley Baker) is more nuanced and well played against type by Baker, even more deluded in his mid life crisis. The two have some excellent scenes together as Pinter's script and Losey's long takes build suspense fully but sometimes misleadingly. Vivien Merchant provides her usual laid back style of deceptive power while Michael York exudes youth and life with Jaquelline Sassard beautiful and comatose. There's also an excellent cameo by Harold Knox as a senior provost foreshadowing Stephen's future, who has to be reminded of his daughter's name. It's an almost soul less existence with all emotion cut off. Accident reflects its title perfectly and in doing so makes it impossible for you not to look away. It is a challenging, exasperating and for some rewarding experience.

Igenlode Wordsmith 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 :-)

MARIO GAUCI This is arguably Losey's masterpiece, overtaking in my mind the more renowned THE SERVANT (1963; see review above). In place of his trademark directorial stylistics, a more formal but equally assured approach to film-making - signaled perhaps by being his last outing with frequent collaborators Dirk Bogarde (with whom he made 5 films), Stanley Baker (4), Alexander Knox (4) and composer Johnny Dankworth (4) - is in evidence here. The only concessions to 'style' are some temporal flourishes a' la Resnais and a superbly enigmatic interlude with Bogarde, where the dialogue between him and former lover Delphine Seyrig is heard as voice-over while the characters are seen interacting in different surroundings! Still, the film's flashback structure is perhaps famed playwright Harold Pinter's doing who contributes a fine, nuanced script.The characters say very little to one another: indeed the film as a whole may be too low-key for most viewers but the real emotions (lust, contempt, pity, hypocrisy) they feel for each other come to the fore regardless through fleeting glances, hesitant remarks, etc.; Bogarde even gets into a stammering fit in especially stressful moments, and only gets to concede to his repressed desires i.e make love to his pupil Jacqueline Sassard, when she is at her most vulnerable - immediately after her boyfriend's tragic death, even though his own wife is pregnant with their third child! The film features an excellent ensemble cast, led by a vulnerable Bogarde and a particularly despicable Baker. This was also Michael York's first major role; in fact, he flew to Cannes specifically to talk with Losey - who was presenting MODESTY BLAISE (1966; see review above) - about getting the part! On the contrary, Sassard would go on to make just one more film - Claude Chabrol's masterly LES BICHES (1968) where, again, she was the 'prize' in a ménage-a'-trois that also comprised Jean-Louis Trintignant and lesbian Stephane Audran! - before disappearing from cinema screens altogether!! Freddie Jones, Pinter himself and Nicholas Mosley (the author of the source novel) appear in small roles, while Gerry Fisher's beautiful cinematography and Dankworth's jazzy score effectively complement the film's pervasive brooding mood.ACCIDENT was nominated for 4 BAFTAs and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival but, again, Losey was criminally neglected at the Oscars.