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.

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 :-)

By 1967 the Swinging Sixties had officially been declared open and artists,pop singers,actors and other self - styled "creative" types found themselves in the avant garde of a movement of exquisitely silly pomposity whereby their every action was endowed with a significance far beyond it's worth and their excesses were indulged as the due of "greatness",a word that was bandied freely about,especially by the aforementioned artists,pop singers and actors.Mr J. Losey's film "Accident",along with "Blow - up" and "The Knack" is at the apogee of this movement.A collaboration with the equally self - regarding Mr H.Pinter,idol of the chattering classes,it solemnly progresses to precisely nowhere with excruciatingly pretentious indifference towards its audience all of which,it presumes,are struck with awe at its coruscating brilliance. Well,all but one maybe.Everybody in it is terribly clever of course,far more so than you or I,so,by extension,what they say must also be terribly clever and if it seems frankly pretty boring then the fault must be in ourselves,not in the Stars (ie Messrs Baker,Bogarde and Yorke who manage to look quite serious throughout). For all his manifest faults I feel myself in agreement with Herman Goering who is noted for saying "When I hear the word "culture" I want to reach for my revolver".When I hear the word "Accident" I want to reach for the remote.

Accident is less watchable than an earlier Losey-Pinter-Bogarde collaboration The Servant. There isn't much dialogue and the plot is uneventful. Nearly the entire film is shown in flashback after a car accident leaves Oxford professor Bogarde's student-friend dead.The film is based on a quadrangle of love-lust by two professors and one student for the same Austrian student. As we gradually learn, its not so hard to get her into bed - but she comes out as the only relatively sympathetic character. Neither of the professors comes out looking good - Stanley Baker being especially sleazy. Neither does Michael York as a student elicit any sympathy because of his cocky manner.Bogarde is perhaps the only reason for continued interest in Accident. He gives another good, understated performance. He continues to show the kind of reserved character we see in The Servant with something more sinister brewing under the surface.