ACCIDENT
2:45 7:00
Wednesday, April 5
(1967, Joseph Losey) Oxford don Dick Bogarde’s mid-life crisis, struggling with the tensions, rivalries, lusts and distrusts shared with students Michael York and Jacqueline Sassard, old flame Delphine Seyrig, pregnant wife Vivien Merchant, and unpleasant colleague Stanley Baker. Pinter’s second Losey collaboration ruthlessly eschews exposition in adapting a novel by Nicholas Mosley, son of British fascist leader Oswald. DCP. Approx. 105 mins.
Reviews
“Put together as carefully as a Hitchcock…It is also recognizably a work of Pinter in the way the story is revealed backwards, in scenes that are jigsawed together to make an emotional continuity instead of a straightforward story line..”
– Roger Ebert
“Does for the midlife crisis what The Graduate did for coming of age, taking a traditional drama about sexual longing and middle-class ennui and reinvigorating it for a time when popular art demanded something new… Accident charts the slow burn down to detonation, the tension mounting with the threat of violence. Losey and Pinter locate the pain that lurks deep within complacency, and the film positively throbs with it. It’s an old idea, perhaps. But in their hands it hurts anew.”
– Calum Marsh, Village Voice