William Wyler (1965)

Thanks to my ignorance of how things turn out in The Collector and to William Wyler’s direction, I found this adaptation of John Fowles’s 1963 novel (from a screenplay by Stanley Mann and John Kohn) truly suspenseful.   Frederick Clegg (Terence Stamp), a Reading bank clerk who’s an amateur but deadly serious lepidopterist, wins big on the football pools and raises his pathologically possessive game.   He buys a big, isolated house in the countryside of south-east England and uses chloroform rather than a butterfly net for his next capture.  Miranda Grey (Samantha Eggar) is now an art student in London but Freddie has had his eye on her since they travelled on the same bus when they were schoolkids in Reading.  He stalks and kidnaps Miranda, drives her back to his house in his van, and locks her in the cellar, which he’s set up with things he thinks she’ll like (art books, a wardrobe of fashionable clothes) as well as things she’ll need (a bed, a small electric heater).  Freddie explains to Miranda that he loves her and wants her to get to know him.  Whatever happens, he tells her, having her there with him will have been worthwhile.  He agrees to release her after four weeks and she counts the days colourfully, marking them off on the bricks of the cellar wall with the art materials Freddie readily buys for her.

Mona Washbourne makes a fleeting appearance as Freddie’s Aunt Annie, in a flashback to the moment her nephew learns he’s won the pools.  An actor called Maurice Dallimore, as a superannuated military neighbour who calls at Freddie’s house at an awkward moment, is on screen for a few minutes.  But The Collector is virtually a two-hander.  (The original cut of the film also included scenes featuring Kenneth More as a doctor but these were removed from the version released in cinemas.)  Psychological battles between a pair of characters – with the regular changes of upper hand that these require – can seem contrived and mechanical, and to be more about the actors than about the people they’re playing.  It’s tempting to assume, ten minutes into The Collector, that you’ve got the whole film summed up.  Yet the two leads and Wyler, with his deep understanding of the dynamic between performers and his mastery of rhythm, prove you wrong.   The tensions between Freddie Clegg and Miranda Grey are remarkably sustained and the outcome is always in doubt.

Their relationship is never a case of Stockholm syndrome.  The one between Freddie and the audience, or this audience member anyway, is something akin to it, though.  Terence Stamp makes Freddie so engaging that I was rooting for him:  when, for example, he grumbles about all the trouble he’s gone to, part of me agreed with Freddie that Miranda might be more appreciative of his conscientious hospitality.  I suppose I’ve always thought that both Terry and Julie (linked forever by ‘Waterloo Sunset’, even if the connection never occurred to Ray Davies) are lookers in more ways than one.  It’s not just that the camera loves Terence Stamp and Julie Christie; they also tend to be less convincing performers whenever they’re speaking lines.  Christie has often been greatly effective but it’s only in Away From Her that I’ve thought her a fully accomplished actress as well as a beautiful star presence.  Watching Billy Budd and The Collector on the same evening changed my mind about Stamp’s acting abilities.

His best work may well have been at the very start of his career but in both films the character he’s playing is impressively absorbed.  It’s apparent that Stamp uses his tight, somewhat ill-fitting suit to work up Freddie Clegg’s gait and gestures but he gets into the young man’s head too.  On what should be Freddie and Miranda’s last evening together before her freedom, he prepares a romantic dinner for two – champagne, caviar, the works.  During their tense, halting conversation Wyler closes in on Stamp’s face and the blue eyes are suddenly merciless:  they tell Miranda that Freddie’s going to renege on his promise to let her go.  Casting Terence Stamp in the role might seem like a piece of typical, wrong-headed Hollywood beautification but I think Wyler could see that Stamp’s good looks would enrich the material as well as hook the audience.  Because he’s so handsome it’s, at one level, baffling that Freddie is cut off from human relationships, and that Miranda isn’t in some way taken with him:  Stamp’s presence guarantees a sexual undertow to the proceedings.   Yet his characterisation of Freddie makes you believe in his isolation – and when an increasingly desperate Miranda tries to seduce Freddie, his disgust is more powerful than it would be if he were physically unprepossessing.

The Collector involves other reversals of expectation.  Although I hoped things would work out for Freddie, I also wanted and expected Miranda to escape eventually.  When the sociable neighbour arrives inconveniently you think he’s bound to come in useful again but he never reappears.  Fowles’s story is a subversive illustration of how money can buy you happiness – or get you close to it anyway.  The script contains plenty of witty lines but the funniest, as well as the most startling, is Freddie’s rejoinder, when Miranda tells him he’s out of his mind, ‘There’d be a blooming lot more of this sort of thing, if more people had the time and the money’.  Samantha Eggar’s success as a film actress was short-lived but she’s increasingly interesting as Miranda:  the girl’s situation is appalling; her resourcefulness and resilience are admirable; but she’s rarely as likeable as her captor.  The class difference between the two characters is a crucial element of the story and Eggar is unafraid to suggest that Miranda, as well as being angry with and frightened by Freddie Clegg, also despises his lack of breeding and culture.  There are moments when Eggar brings to mind not just Katharine Hepburn’s colouring but also her scathing forthrightness.

Maurice Jarre’s music is intermittently effective at best; Wyler certainly uses it too much.  There’s the odd bit of plotting which creaks, particularly in the closing stages.  I was doubtful that Freddie would lock Miranda in his butterfly gallery, given that she threatened to disturb his precious specimens the first time he showed them off to her.  When she hits and hurts him with a shovel and, after getting her back in her dungeon, Freddie drives himself to a hospital for treatment, the medical staff are remarkably incurious about how he got his injury – the blood from which is a rather too brilliant red.  For the most part, though, the vivid colouring – Robert Krasker and Robert Surtees both have cinematography credits – works well, and the images of a picture- postcard English countryside are a nice counterpoint to what’s going on inside the house.

It’s fascinating, when Freddie drives up to town to trail and abduct Miranda, to see central London just as it was turning into Swinging London.   (There’s a self-referential joke shot of a cinema showing Ben-Hur:  although it was released in 1959, it’s not so hard to believe, given the box-office longevity in Britain of big hits of half a century ago, that the film would still be showing several years on.)   In the early stages of The Collector I was puzzled as to why Wyler made immediately clear what Freddie Clegg was up to, why he didn’t take the story in chronological order from before the point at which Freddie wins the pools.  Wyler’s decision proves to be shrewd:  the structure he uses helps to ensure that the audience’s feelings about Freddie are continuously volatile.  Because he has a brief voiceover at the very beginning you assume that Freddie will survive to the end of the story.  But you’re never prepared for quite how this story ends.

1 May 2013