Plot

A beautiful Austrian coed attending Oxford University is betrothed to a fellow student, but she ends up getting involved with two unhappily married professors instead.

The Oxford Professor of Philosophy Stephen (Sir Dirk Bogarde) has two favorite pupils, the athletic aristocrat William (Michael York) and the Austrian Anna von Graz (Jacqueline Sassard). Stephen is a frustrated man, with a dismissive wife, Rosalind (Vivien Merchant), who is pregnant with their third child, and is envious of the Oxford professor Charley (Stanley Baker), who has a television show. Stephen feels attracted to Anna, but William woos her and she becomes his girlfriend. Charley has a love affair with Anna, but when things go wrong, Anna must leave town.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Contentedly married to mother-of-two Rosalind, Stephen, a professor at Oxford University, finds himself caught in a rut. Fearing emotional numbness, while locking horns with his student William, whose vigour he envies, and with his friend Charley, whose successful sex life he covets, Stephen secretly yearns for an affair with beautiful but cryptic Anna. Now, inescapable fatal attraction, ungovernable passions, a sinful love triangle, and profound moral bankruptcy threaten to trap everyone in the dark side of desire, culminating in a horrible car accident that will haunt them for life.—Nick Riganas

Stephen (Sir Dirk Bogarde) is a married Oxford professor experiencing the pangs of a mid-life crisis as he begins to bristle at the stifling emotional repression of the society in which he lives. Things begin to change for him when he meets Anna von Graz (Jacqueline Sassard), a beautiful student who is engaged to William (Michael York), another of Stephen's students. Though he begins to feel alive again in her presence, Stephen's feelings for Anna can only end in tragedy for them and those around them.—Jean-Marc Rocher <rocher@fiberbit.net>