X-Ray Treatment

Accident. A metal-crunching car crash shatters the silence of a warm Oxford night. In the wreck lie a boy (Michael York), mangled and dead, and a beautiful girl (Jacqueline Sassard), in shock but uninjured. A university don (Dirk Bogarde) runs to the car, recognizes its occupants as his students, and gives the girl his hand. As she emerges, she steps on the dead boy's face--an act that symbolizes what is past in her life and what is to come in the film. The don takes the girl into his home, puts her to sleep on his bed, and . . .

Abruptly, Accident whirrs into a lengthy flashback, detailing the events that led to the tragedy. Bogarde is an aging womanizer who has backed comfortably into pipe-puffing middle-age. Outwardly content, he is actually bored with his life and his pregnant wife, and yearns to recapture his vanished youth in an affair with Sassard, an Austrian princess. She, however, has two far more successful suitors. The first, an agreeable adolescent aristocrat (York), becomes her fiance. The other, a university tutor (Stanley Baker) who seems to have a postgraduate degree in seduction, becomes her lover.

The accident unleashes the pent-up violence of sexual longing and onrushing age. Bogarde coldly proceeds to make love to the benumbed girl, then smuggles her back to the safety of her dorm, protecting her from the police who will never know that it was she who drunkenly drove the boy to his death. At film's end, the princess leaves Oxford to fly home. Baker, the self-confident Don Juan, proves to be an ineffectual wan don, unable to stop her. Bogarde resignedly returns to his pipe, his books, his stoic, sad-eyed wife.

Accident's glacial dissection of human passion takes place against the brilliant background of a green Oxonian summer, accenting the mood of haunting irony that Director Joseph Losey (The Servant) strove for. But despite the excellence of his camera work, and of Bogarde in the central role, Accident is a flawed work. The fault is largely that of Scriptwriter Harold Pinter (The Homecoming). His customarily cryptic dialogue probes too deeply, revealing all of the characters' inner anxiety and guilt, almost none of their outward life and feeling. Although they suffer from pangs of the flesh, they seem to be skeletal symbols rather than passionate human beings, not truly moving or fully alive. Accident ultimately suggests a tragedy that has been recorded not by a camera but by an X-ray machine.

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