Accident

Director: Joseph Losey | Screenwriter: Harold Pinter | Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker, Jacqueline Sassard, Michael York | UK 1967 | 105 min | Cert: 12A | A restoration by the BFI National Archive

Accident plays out in Oxford over a few languid, hot summer weeks. Stephen (Dirk Bogarde) is a fortyish academic with a wife, two children and a third on the way. He develops an obsession with one of his students, Anna (Jacqueline Sassard), a beautiful Austrian princess. When, however, he discovers that another of his students, William (Michael York), is also attracted to her, and that she is having an affair with his middle-aged, married colleague Charley (Stanley Baker), the three enter into a disastrous power struggle to win her.

The film has been newly restored by the BFI National Archive to mark Joseph Losey's centenary this year.

Accident was Losey's second collaboration with Harold Pinter and Dirk Bogarde, and many consider this subtle, witty study of simmering class conflict and sexual tension to be Losey and Pinter's finest work together. Based on the novel by Nicholas Mosley, Accident won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1967 and is now considered one of the great British films of the era.