The Losey-Pinter 1967 film, Accident, is well crafted in all respects except that the leading characters are loathsome

 The 2nd of the Losey-Pinter projects - Accident (1967) - available on Criterion, is less ominous and peculiar than the first collaboration, The Servant, with it's odd camera angles and the menacing undertone of moral corruption and psychological torment. Accident is a more straightforward socio-drama and it feels much more cinematic and less like that film adaptation of a stage play. Briefly, the plot consists 2 Oxford "dons," close pals apparently, who find themselves in a deadly rivalry for the affections of a student, who herself is something of an exotic femme fatale (and who, by the way, never utter a word about their work, their ideas, or their reading). It's also a bit of a class-relations tragedy, although tempered in that the dons, or at least one of them, seems pretty damn aristo (maybe psueudo aristo, but anyway wealthy) himself. There are a few high-tension scenes, well crafted by screenwriter par excellence Pinter and well managed by the great camera work of director Losey. All that said, both films but especially this one, are headed by morally corrupt and unlikable male characters that by the end you just (figuratively) shrug and say "a plague on both your houses." Nice that the film opens with the eponymous accident, in which the young woman walks, or at least stumbles, away and her young boyfriend apparently dies - and then Pinter jumps back in time to the onset of the web of attractions and relationships and we never learn precisely what happened in the accident until the end - which, by the way, is framed by a weird and provocative closing sequence.