Movie Poster of the Week: Joseph Losey’s “Accident”

A selection of original international posters for the newly revived Losey-Pinter-Bogarde masterpiece.
Adrian Curry

Above: Japanese B1 poster for Accident (Joseph Losey, UK, 1967).

With the 67th Cannes Film Festival on the eve of its award ceremony, Film Forum is reviving the winner of Grand Prix du Jury from the festival’s 20th edition, Joseph Losey’s AccidentThe top prize (then the Grand Prix du Festival, now the Palme d’Or) of that year, 1967, went to Antonioni’s Blow-Up, but Accident, written by Harold Pinter, was equally as daring and confounding. Starring Dirk Bogarde (who had worked his magic with Losey and Pinter four years earlier in The Servant), Stanley Baker and Jacqueline Sassard, Accident is a Resnaisian time-shifting mind-boggler set among the dreaming spires of Oxford rather than Antonioni’s Swinging Sixties London.

A film that has been almost impossible see for many years, Accident has been digitally restored by Rialto Pictures and will be traveling around the country. I’ve collected as many international posters for the film as I could find, and their variety is striking, as if every country had a different take on the film. The quality is variable too, my favorites being the fractured montage of the Japanese poster, above, and the deep-red comic book look of the Danish design. Waldemar Swierzy’s Polish jagged blue abstract is quite something too, made the same year as his own much more famous poster for Blow-up.

Above: the British quad poster. 

Above: the US one sheet.

Above: The French poster. 

Above: The Italian poster. 

Above: The German poster.  

Above: The Danish poster. 

 Above: The Spanish poster, designed by Macario Gomez, aka Mac.

Above: a US half-poster. 

Above: the Polish poster by Waldemar Swierzy (1931-2013). 

Above: The 1969 Czech poster by Josef Vyleťal (1940-1989).

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Movie Poster of the WeekJoseph LoseyDirk BogardeStanley BakerHarold PinterspotlightColumns
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