Dir. Joseph Losey, UK, 1967, 105 mins

Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker, Michael York, Jacqueline Sassard, Vivien Merchant, Delphine Seyrig

Review by Colin Dibben

Is this the best British film of the 1960s? The lovely English summer – average temperature 24 degrees? – never felt so diseased as in Joseph Losey’s film, now given the 4K treatment and absolutely unmissable.

Two back-stabbing, status-obsessed, sexually predatory, heavy drinking, identifying-as-middle-aged Oxford dons go totally toxic in this brilliantly unpleasant tale, with great performances throughout, scripted by Harold Pinter. What’s not to like?

Stephen (Bogarde) is a 40 year-old Philosophy don with a wife and two young children, a third on the way, living in a cosy rural retreat of a house (although electricity pylons and road noise are never totally absent).

Stephen likes the look of one of his posh female students, Anna (Sassard), but finds that a colleague, Charley (Baker) – all alpha male and with a TV series under his belt too – has already bedded her.

Stephen’s sexual frustrations are mixed with frustrations about his social status, which he finds an outlet for in another relationship, with young aristocrat student William (York).

A traditional love triangle morphs into a love and class quadrangle or even pentagon as the summer progresses towards a fatal, violent climax.

Most of the film is told in flashback, after a car accident outside Stephen’s house; which somehow makes the eventual return to the present even more horrifying.

This is the sort of film where you have to pay attention to glances and the unsaid – if you do the effect is devastating. The female characters remain essentially inscrutable in their dazed victimhood, although Stephen’s wife Rosalind (Merchant) hits the nail bang on the head with many of her comments. The guys, however, are always betraying their condescending, passive-aggressive feelings – and their potential for violence – with glances and ironically inadequate words.

Pinter and Losey give the whole thing the feel of Alain Resnais’ chilly Last Year in Marienbad (underscored by a weird, un-synced cameo from that film’s Delphine Seyrig), full of awkward, frozen moments. This is quite a feat given the lush Oxford college summer we are treated to on the surface. Jonny Dankworth’s score features harp music, which lulls you into a gentle midsummer mood, only for the rest of the film to tread all over that.

Some people find Pinter’s dialogue to be mannered, but I think he is spot on in catching the dislocations and non-sequiturs in the speech of restrained middle-class people.