![]() In adapting the novel, Pinter dispensed with the first person narrative to provide an objective Stephen (as played by Dirk Bogarde in his fifth film with the director) and in the process lost the stream of consciousness meanderings that explain his motivations. ![]() It is the events that led to the fateful moment, when individual and collective actions spun out of control that forms the narrative. The novel (and the film) begins with the ‘accident’ of the title, with Anna surviving a car crash that kills William as they are on their way to Stephen’s house. Stephen – who is married to Rosalind with two children and a third due – is wracked with guilt over the potential affair, but is unable to extricate himself from the unspoken competition with William and Charley. Anna’s charms also beguile William, another of Stephen’s students and Charley, Stephen’s best friend. Nicholas Mosley’s 1963 novel Accident is a free association, first person account of a fateful summer in which Oxford philosophy tutor Stephen falls for Anna, a student from Austria. Accident was not a step in a new direction instead it is slamming of the door on his British cottage industry. However, recently experiencing Accident had me revising my thoughts rather than the promise of the wave that did not eventuate, Accident is Losey’s confessional, a self-examination of his own contradictions, his place in British cinema and of the medium at that time. ![]() 2 Unfortunately, the financial failure of both directors’ films coupled with instability within the local industry scuppered the notion of a modernist, middlebrow British arthouse cycle. ![]() Tony Richardson was also attempting a career reinvention at the time with a pair of European-set arthouse features starring Jeanne Moreau. Having been enthralled by Accident since first encountering it on late night television over thirty years ago, later viewings left me with the sense that the film was a precursor to a second British New Wave, one that broke from the adherence to realism and instead employed a European formalist approach. I thought – We wish their destruction” – Nicholas Mosley, Accident (1965) 1įollowing his foray into big-budget commercial filmmaking with the pop-camp messiness of Modesty Blaise (1966), director Joseph Losey returned to the more familiar and certain territory of dysfunctional masculinity with Accident (1967), reuniting him with writer Harold Pinter with whom he’d enjoyed critical success on The Servant (1963). ![]()
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