Rated: UR
Run Time: 119 mins
Director: William Wyler
Starring: Terence Stamp, Samantha
Eggar, Mona Washbourne
The Collector’s Freddie Clegg is an altogether
different sort of villain. He is, in some ways, more sinister than most. With his bland cunning
and dough-faced innocent visage, he is almost sympathetic. As such, he is
much of a kind with a new sort of killer that had ostensibly arrived with
Hitchcock’s Psycho and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom of the same year, 1960. I
suppose one could make an argument that the character had appeared much
earlier still, with Peter Lorre’s child killer in Fritz Lang’s M or even Hitchcock’s own particular
version of The Lodger.
This new type of killer was the
kind of fellow who could not have a real relationship with a woman unless it
were characterized by possession and dominance. Movies of this ilk were
prototypes for the European (and I say European for a reason, because I am not
entirely convinced the Italians created the giallo) giallo. Later, the
giallo as a sort of prototype would be replaced by the dreaded slasher
flick. These newer films featured an antihero who was not as much
“psychologically motivated” as straight-out motherfucking batshit crazy.
Superficially these men are outwardly normal, if eccentric, but they are always
incredibly introverted and pathologically shy. This was the first (or,
second if you must have it that way) incarnation of the psycho killer. He
is with us still, to this very day.
Our first sight of Freddie is as
he lopes at a slow jog through a field, chasing a butterfly. It is a rare
specimen apparently, and will be a welcome addition to his vast collection (this
is a motif that would be used again by Thomas Harris many years later in The Silence of the Lambs,
although the metaphor would be reworked). Near his jaunt, there is a
large manor house that is for sale. There is an attachment to the
structure that is composed of an outer room and, down a series of steps, what
can only be described as a dungeon room with sinister stone walls. This
gives Freddie an idea. It’s an idea that’s been forming for some time,
actually. He has recently won a large sum in what seems like a lottery of
sorts (they call it the football pools), and, as this idea is going to cost a
pound or two, his recent winnings are fortuitous indeed.
Now, it is certain that Freddie
is not going to miss his job very much. His co-workers mock him.
It’s easy to make fun of the outsider, the alienated, and the lonely.
Cruel people do it. I am convinced that the ones who embarrassed or
humiliated you in school never really change, unless for the worse. I
pity poor Freddie his social awkwardness, his inability to transcend class and
his lack of culture (this is one of the purported reasons John Fowles wrote the
book, to out and condemn the ugliness of class conscious England in the era of
the “angry young man”). What is a poor whacked out psycho freak bug
collector with a vivid fantasy life to do? Eventually, Freddie buys the
house and retires to live the life of a country squire.
Oh, and he kidnaps a girl he’s
been ogling from afar to put her up in that dungeon I just mentioned.
This is the plan that Freddie, like any good incipient serial murderer, has
carefully nurtured, for which he has plotted the logistical details for some
time. Like anybody who means business, he has not only thought a great
deal about it, he’s got a by-God plan.
As if she were a butterfly, Freddie uses chloroform to anesthetize a young art
student named Miranda Grey, to whom he’s taken a fancy. He then books her
a room at his “wow, am I whacked out crazy or what?”
B&B in the country. He has done this in the unspoken hope that she
will “learn to love him.” He lays her out in a bed, takes off her shoes,
and the chastely pulls down her skirt (which has hitched up). From these
very first gestures, we can see that Freddie objectifies Miranda much as he
does his extensive and marvelous collection of butterflies.
Sound familiar? Well,
that’s how John Fowles wrote it, and he absolutely deserves the credit for this
archetype (unless Robert Bloch does, it’s a close call; the taxidermied birds
of Norman do precede Freddie’s flittering
butterflies). The lonely, introverted, keeps-to-himself, “he was always
such a quiet neighbor” type of perverted psycho creepoid (think Ed Gein, Reg
Christie, Dennis Nilsen, Jeffrey Dahmer). The sort of man whose only
means of experiencing a relationship is through the twin lens of obsession and
ownership. A fellow who can only feel passion through a prism of
voyeuristic objectification, possession.
The scene after his plan goes off
(flawlessly) is interesting. He secretes her in the room he’s laid out
and goes into the main house. Then it starts to rain. While he
first narrowly escaped becoming drenched with the initial downpour, he now
willfully runs into the deluge with a childlike joy that reads like a release
of tension, a relaxation and self-satisfaction with his success. This is
juxtaposed with Miranda awakening in gradually dawning horror at her
predicament, before Freddie descends the steps and she sees him for the first
time.
Stamp and Samantha Eggar as
Miranda breathe life into their literary counterparts, only two years
after the novel was written (Fowles wrote the screenplay himself). I
don’t know if The Collector is a classic of literature (perhaps a
minor one?), but there was very little time left to the prospective filmmaker
to gain any perspective on its importance as a work or for the literary critics
to tease out possible meanings before it was committed to film. Yet,
Fowles was apparently happy with the finished product. That is largely because
of the leads, I think.
Terence Stamp plays to the
nuances of the character marvelously. We know Freddie’s up to no good
from the start, but it is only as the action progresses that we begin to
understand just how bad he really is, how dangerous. Every
escape attempt Miranda makes is quickly revealed to be a trap laid by Freddie
to test her, whether or not she’ll really stick around, whether she really
likes him. How much can you trust someone you’ve kidnapped and
sequestered in what amounts to a medieval dungeon that you’ve creepily
furnished as a young lady’s boudoir?
Samantha Eggar as Miranda is, I
think, ultimately whom we pull for, not Freddie, whom we may pity but who also
revolts us. As a character, she is alive with the potentiality of youth,
energetic, clever, and desperate. It seems such a simple thing to create
characters who represent microcosmic types but who are also recognizably human,
but I suspect it's not. Their performances and their chemistry
keep our interest in a movie peopled by so few
characters.
In praising the acting, I'm not
neglecting the direction of the great William Wyler. If I remember
correctly, it was he who gave such sage practical advice on film acting to,
yes, Laurence Olivier (in Wuthering
Heights). Wyler turned down the opportunity to direct The Sound of Music for this movie
(Robert Wise, of The Haunting, took
the reins; it’s a small world), a wise choice if you were to ask me. One
is considered a classic and the other is little known now, but I still prefer
the thriller to the other.
As an aside…man, directors in the
old days were versatile; check out Wise’s CV some time: psychological horror,
Val Lewton RKO B-Unit horror!, musicals, science fiction, noir thrillers,
adventure, westerns, war films, mysteries...incredible, and many of them
classics.
Fowles later wrote that the book
was in part a diatribe against class conflict and how that conflict manifested
itself among the ineffectual efforts of the working class to ascend to the
station of their betters and the inability of the snotty privileged classes to
understand what great responsibility their good fortune placed on them.
In this context, the discussion of The
Catcher in the Rye is
enlightening. I’ve read Salinger's book and been conditioned, as has
Miranda, to regard it as a modern classic. But I cannot find fault with
Freddie’s dissection of it. His argument that the literary criticism that
has lionized Salinger’s best-known work it is all so much pseudo-intellectual
posturing is not unreasonable.
But when you make your hoi polloi
pseudo-antagonist a man who is incapable of empathy and your victim a female
who is a bit snotty and entitled, well-heeled, pursuing a liberal arts
education that we all know is a luxury of the privileged when the rest of us
have to get real jobs, well then you’ve rendered your tale with a bit of a
misogynist sheen. The movie cannot entirely escape that reading, either.
Still, while we can view Freddie
and Miranda as symbols of their social class, I would prefer a literal
reading. The characters work well enough as individuals. And I see
the film as being important more for helping establish a very interesting
horror stereotype that would be mined to great effect in the future than for
contributing anything of value to England’s discussion on class
distinctions. Who really gives a shit in the 21st century? Not an American, I can
tell you that. The movie still entertains because I believe there really
do exist people like Freddie Clegg, and they really are dangerous. And
we, although largely women it would seem, are their prey.
Freddie Clegg is deservedly
Stamp’s breakout role. Smallish, he never really seems too overtly
threatening, but his actions, and the clinical calculation that precedes them,
unveil before us, under out greater comprehension, a monster. The actor
is a slight guy, not much bigger than Samantha Eggar, but he is constantly
foiling her every effort to gain any slight advantage in their
relationship. It is as if he were cruelly toying with her as much as testing
her obedience. The way he does so creates an aura of
disquieting menace about the character. I can’t describe it better than
that. You'll have to watch it to see if you agree.
The movie is not without its
flaws. Perhaps the most egregious is that the screenplay doesn’t always
let the camera do its job. Show, don’t tell…good advice. The shot
of Samantha Eggar’s face framed, as a reflection, within the confines of one of
Freddie’s glass cases, full of mounted specimens, is a clever visual
metaphor. I don’t know whether or not the idea is, cinematically, innovative
as an image, but I at least found it satisfying.
Here's the problem, though:
the moment is ruined in the very next instant when Miranda just comes right out
and reiterates what we’ve just seen. We get it. She’s a new
addition to his collection. And he’s a collector. And the name of
the movie is, The Collector, which
is also, you know, the name of the book, The
Collector. I don’t know if this scene is in the source novel, but
that doesn’t make it any more palatable in the movie.
I want to revisit something I
wrote earlier. So very much has been made about the fictional
counterparts to Ed Gein over the years, but I wonder if, in The Silence of the Lambs,
Thomas Harris consciously chose to reuse the entomology angle from The Collector. Jame
Gumb’s interest in entomology is dissimilar to Freddie’s (and to Conan Doyle’s
villainous Arthur Stapleton, as well). Not that that book is concerned
with metamorphosis, any more than Psycho is concerned with naturalism.
But the use of entomology, specifically butterfly collection, as a metaphor for
obsession and the sublimation of sadism and homicidal misogyny in favor of a
more palatable form of possession (real intimacy, much less a normal and
healthy sexuality, is out the window for these men…like way-ass out the window) is a cogent
idea. Perhaps Wyler did not capitalize as effectively as he could have on
the visual possibilities inherent in the metaphor. The idea was right
there, presumably sufficiently elucidated by John Fowles. If so, it was a
missed opportunity.
There is not much else to say
about the movie, really. It’s just one series of narrow non-escapes after
another, the two of them bargaining for freedom and companionship in turn,
conversations about ideas, art, standards of beauty…and then it ends, just as
you think it’s going to end. And if you thought it was going to end in
any other way, you have not been paying attention.
The Horror Inkwell Rating: 5/5
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