On Screen

...Let me give a typical example...

...Later, at a genteel cricket game where in turn we are treated to the hostility between William and Charley, Anna informs Stephen that she is marrying William (no reason given) and asks Stephen to convey this to Charley and report his reaction to her...

...Please give her mine when you see her again.—Oh, I don't know when I'll see her again...

...Does this mean that aristocrats are medieval and obsolete...

...And when, for no other apparent reason except to spite Charley, Anna decides to marry William, she wishes Stephen to bring the bad news to the loser and report back on the reaction?for tripled sadistic delight...

...He then makes advances to Anna, who, at first, resists...

...in Accident, become a man, Charley...

...This is followed in short order by a close-up of bottles on a lawn from which we zoom out to the various principals and the children scattered on the grass...

...These pediatric remarks are prompted by Accident, but they apply with roughly equal relevance to almost any film or play of Pinter's...

...He has cunning, impudence and wit way beyond his years, so what matter if his psyche is that of a baby...

...3) When asked about your work, keep smilingly silent, or practice every form of put-down or put-on you can muster...

...Stephen, quietly gloating, tells him that she was to have married William...

...Stephen has a discreet hankering for this moody girl, but assumes that she is involved with William...

...Or, when Stephen next sees her father, the Provost: "I saw Fran-cesca when I was in London...

...or about the meaning of two or three closely related men sharing her, or even promoting the others' involvements with her...

...but let Stephen say the next minute that he is off on one, and she promptly accompanies him—this fish, after all, still needs hooking...

...In a rare moment of communicativeness, Losey revealed (usually he wraps the mantle of obscurity as tightly about himself as Pinter does) that the line stems from Pinter's coming for a script conference to Corsica, where he was vacationing, and where, apparently, Sicilian horseflies also come for a vacation—or for the vacationers...

...others, who are doing their garden, declare, "I'm doing the garden...

...We get a close-up of the sun, and zoom out to Stephen walking...

...When Stephen comes home from London to find Charley in flagrante with a woman, several tricks are used to keep the audience in suspense about whether it is Anna or Rosalind...

...Or that they are water spouts...

...During an interminable Sunday get-together at Stephen's—the best scene in the film: as the day meanders into drunken night the undercurrents of animosity become more pronounced —it emerges that Stephen is going up to London to see Charley's bbc producer about appearing on Charley's show, and that Rosalind, Stephen's wife, will be off to Granny's to have her third baby...

...There are diverse angle shots, some good, some studied...

...That they are monsters yet beautiful...

...Your daughter.—Ah...

...I don't want to become Freudian about the implications of Anna's gratuitous bitchiness...

...The hell with it: He wants Anna and must have her...

...Stephen sneaks Anna back into her dormitory at dawn...

...Similar confusions pullulate in Accident...

...Anna and Rosalind are instinctive rivals and enemies, yet they can take a friendly walk together as if nothing were amiss...

...Rosalind, tormented by jealousy, shuttles between provoking taciturnity and needling sarcasm...

...Why gargoyles...

...Stephen gives Charley a key to his house, and leaves...

...there is the whole Fran-cesca episode done in voice-over (action and off-screen dialogue deliberately unsynchronized) for no cogent reason...

...This can have numerous profound significances: People have nothing to say, or only the obvious, or cannot accept the obvious, or the evidence of their senses...

...With a measure of talent and mastery of this trio of tricks, you become the Kierkegaard of the kindergarten...

...first he goes to see the two wronged wives, Charley's and his own (the time sequence is muddied here), then on to a house party at William's aristocratic mansion, where a brutal version of indoor rugby on marble floors is played by the young male guests while the ladies watch...

...What is the exact meaning of Sicilian horseflies from Corsica...

...he tells the preterna-turally incompetent police William was alone in the car...

...it seems they have been lovers for quite some time...

...If William, who adores Anna, wants to take a walk with her, she is too tired...

...At a combination press conference and symposium, Losey praised a questioner who wondered whether the usual dominating, predatory female in Losey's films (the heroine of Eva is archetypal here) had not...

...Charley, the archaeologist, is also a novelist and television personality, a brash arriviste whom the scrupulous Stephen envies...

...The director decks out the picture with all kinds of arty gimmicks, such as, for example, a series of pointless zoomings out...

...c) meaning has gone out of human utterance...

...As the principals lounge around Stephen's lawn that Sunday afternoon, Charley complains of terrible flies while William denies their being around...

...Oh, really, I'm 10 years older...

...William is killed and Stephen hides the dazed Anna...

...It is just such points in Pinter's plays that have been learnedly scrutinized and stormily debated for years...

...What are you doing?' asks her husband...

...Losey explains that the dog was supposed to go into the house, but chose to run off in the opposite direction...

...Now there's ambiguity for you to ponder...

...Charley reads out loud a letter his wife has written Stephen, begging him to induce her husband to return to her...

...Interchangeably untrustworthy, certainly, are Pinter and Losey, so that it is hard to say, for instance, which one of them conceived of panning to gargoyles in an Oxford cloister while Stephen tells William that "all aristocrats were made to be killed...

...There is a scene in which Stephen tells his pregnant wife about Charley's affair with Anna...

...You will thus shroud yourself in a tantalizing mystery and be a sort of intellectual Greta Garbo...

...they crash right outside Stephen's house...

...If this child grows up at all, it will turn out bad...

...Both have nice wives and children, but Stephen, the philosopher, is 40 and worried about it...

...Putting on a dressing gown," she replies...

...But here was another irrelevant, misleading, and therefore irresistible ambiguity...

...Rosalind has an atypical outburst and covers Charley with abuse, obviously venting her rage at Stephen's guessed infidelity in this indirect way...

...and (d) it's all just one non-utterance after another, and that's life—in a Pinter opus, at any rate...

...I have dwelt so long on the seamily inconsequential plot precisely because it is on seaminess and pseudoconsequence that Pinter and his director, Joseph Losey, thrive...

...Consult next year's film journals for the metaphysical explication...

...The first step is to siphon out the maximum amount of meaningful dialogue, leaving about four fifths of the film pregnant silence hovering ominously over the remaining fifth of speech...

...Rosalind puts on a dressing gown...

...At a time when the whole English-language theater is in one of its periodic stages of infancy, and the nursery is full of goody-goody toddlers, bawling brats, and burbling tykes, Pinter is just plain precocious...

...2) Stick in as many ugly jokes and befogging ambiguities as possible: Even a sophomoric jape in a tart sauce of ambivalence strikes the gullible palate as haute cuisine...

...Indeed...

...It is interesting to note that almost all the shirts worn by the dons in the film have a pattern of squares...

...He and Anna have been drinking...

...The dog could have been made to perform properly in a retake, or the footage of his misguided race could have been cut rather than lovingly dwelt on...

...People in the film keep asking other people who are making beds or packing their bags what they are doing...

...Ah, but the platitudes reek with profundity...

...It must, however, be added that there is wit in the film, as in a senior common-room scene, as well as good color photography by Gerry Fisher...

...None of this takes place...

...How is she?—She sends you her love.?Thank you...

...But I strongly feel that there is an unexplored murkiness here that does not complement the willed obscurities but only aggravates them and further confuses the issue...

...He is cosseted, rewarded, bowed down to well beyond his deserts and ability to cope...

...Charley even has an inkling that Stephen and the girl may be in cahoots—how, otherwise, could she have known about the accident so early...

...There is another scene bursting with barely suppressed hostilities...

...As the young aristocrats, Michael York and Jacqueline Sassard are hopeless ciphers, possibly abetted in this by the director, but plainly supplying a good deal of native insufficiency...

...out of revenge on her, on Charley, on growing old...

...This former and, occasionally, present actor has worked out a three-part program for himself...

...1) Use dialogue with cryptic laconism: Make it mostly commonplaces but surround these with an indefinable, lurking, omnipresent nastiness and have the most banal utterance bulge with an ill-concealed threat...

...b) they do not communicate, or else only in half-truths, lies, trivialities...

...And those characters who are not shown as competitive, spiteful, vindictive, are either callous, like the bbc producer, or silly and ineffectual, like the Oxford faculty...

...In London, Stephen is callously slighted by the assistant producer (a cameo part played raffishly by Pinter himself) and consoles himself by briefly renewing an old affair with Francesca, his provost's daughter, now a London career woman...

...Thus in The Servant the noxious machinations of the protagonist against his aristocratic employer seem to be in part justified by class warfare...

...And what about the end of the film, when the symbolic accident is heard on the soundtrack: The family dog is seen madly racing toward the front gate—is there perhaps another real accident, after all...

...Del-phine Seyrig is wasted on the non-part of Francesca, but Ann Firbank somehow manages to squeeze a pathetic radiance out of her brief moment as the neglected Laura...

...On returning to his house, he finds Charley and Anna carrying on...

...Being an actor helps...

...The next step is to infuse the whole thing with an all-permeating nastiness...

...The simple but by no means convincing plot (it is full of such improbabilities as Anna's leaving the party with William on the fatal night going totally unnoticed) must now be Pinterized...

...Or are they to be explained as an incipient homosexual dominance of the servant over his master, which is, in turn, part of the basic rivalry in a power-mad society...

...Oxford and environs look seductively alluring, and there are laudable performances by Dirk Bogarde, Vivien Merchant, Stanley Baker and Alexander Knox...

...Accident concerns the rivalry of two Oxford dons, Stephen and Charley...

...What is deleterious to an artist is not the nature of his sexuality but the stratagems into which repression drives him...

...Instead, William and Anna drive over to Stephen's late at night after a party: William wants Stephen's advice about something...

...Can't be!—Must be.?It is.—You don't look a day older...

...Stephen has a pupil, William, a young aristocrat in love with another pupil, Anna, an Austrian princess...

...Charley is a brute in don's clothing...

...From this sort of thing we learn that (a) people are lost in self-absorption...

...During the latter, he is interrupted by an imperious ring of the telephone: His wife is giving birth, she may be in danger...

...and there is Stephen's visit to his wife intercut with his calling on Laura for purposes of comparison that would be as palpable without the pyrotechnics...

...You may object that this writing reeks with platitudes...

...With uncharacteristic generosity, Losey wished that other viewers would be as perceptive as this one...

...Anna leaves and Stephen returns to his tutoring and family life, but the noise of the accident is repeated balefully on the soundtrack: It will haunt these people forever...

...Not without some justification, the question of repressed homosexuality has been raised in connection with the work of Pinter and Losey, both joint and separate...

...The bewildered Charley tries to remonstrate with Anna and also with Stephen: Why should the girl who loves him and whom he craves leave just because William is dead...

...But there are also scenes of deliberate obfuscation, as the Sunday sleep-in at Stephen's when Charley, Anna and William stay over, and mysterious female feet float along the darkened staircase —to whose room?—which is followed by a curious boudoir scene between Stephen and Rosalind in which not only the motivations but the entire situation is purposely kept dark...

...when Stephen guesses that she was driving, she finds it safer to submit, however rancor-ously...

...clearly even Beatrice Dawson, the costumiere, is a perfect Pinterite symbolist...

...Soon after, Rosalind is watching the others at tennis, from which we zoom out to the players...

...Francesca may seem to be an easygoing, sexually obliging woman, yet after sex with Stephen she is smoking furiously in bed, while Stephen's feet under the sheet vainly seek hers, stiffly outstretched and unyielding...

...here the hostility between William and Stephen becomes manifest...

...What is the existential significance of these Sicilian stingers amid Oxonian vespers...

...And Laura, Charley's wife and the gentlest of women, is shown as the prototypical dumb victim, who is as it were, asking for everything she gets...

...Anna, who hardly ever speaks and then only in grunts or barks, exudes a menacing apathy...

...Not content with putting us on, Pinter and Losey must also put on the dog...

...And, in the case of Losey, whose sympathies are with the Left (he was blacklisted in Hollywood), the matter is complicated by a social animus against the upper class...

...Like certain other psychological details in the film, this is well observed, but one has the unhappy impression that Pinter and Losey have much less insight into their own indirect or generalized hostility...

...The critical spirit is willing, but the mind boggles...

...For instance, when Stephen meets Fran-cesca again: "It's been 10 years.?It can't be...

...But this somnambulism has to be further enhanced...

...They're Sicilian horseflies," says Charley, swatting one, "from Corsica...

...After the process of Pinteriza-tion comes Loseyfying...

...The deadliest venom is reserved for the women, however...

...This is actually the beginning of the movie: the foregoing synopsis is a huge flashback...

...even the gentle William becomes violently hostile during the vicious rugby game complacently watched by old men and maliciously savored by women of all ages, including scarcely nubile girls...

...she is packing and about to fly back home...

...Stephen, the most sympathetic character, commits perfunctory adultery with Francesca and brutally domineering adultery with Anna...

...Afterward he and Charley meet in her room...

...There, again, the point may be the untenable one that all women are interchangeably untrustworthy...

...That fifth must, next, be reduced to commonplaces, banalities, echolalia, all in the interest of a greater sense of dislocation, solipsism, alienation...