The Collector

#15 in my ranking of William Wyler’s filmography.

William Wyler returned to his roots with The Children’s Hour, met middling financial success, and did a Hitchcock. I mean that specifically regarding how as the studio system was in the final stages of collapse in the early 60s, Hitchcock had to go to England to make Frenzy. Though, it’s also to note that The Collector is somewhat Hitchcockian (make the redhead a blonde, and it’s one heavy step closer) to the point where Wyler consciously decided to not use Bernard Herrmann as composer because he was too intimately tied to Hitchcock. Why do that unless Wyler knew he was touching a toe into the cinematic realm that Hitchcock dominated so completely for so long?

This is a film of two characters (there are four credited actors on the film itself). The titular collector is Freddie (Terrence Stamp), an awkward young man who won a small fortune which got him out of his bank job. While chasing a butterfly one day, he comes across an old Tudor home for sale and decides that he will not only buy it, but he will use it to house a woman he will kidnap and has admired from afar for years. That young woman is Miranda (Samantha Eggers), and she has no idea who this guy is, why he’s obsessed with her, nor where she is when she wakes up after he grabs her in the street with some chloroform.

What Freddie wants to achieve is to keep Miranda in his underground bunker (fully furnished with gentle treatment from her jailer) until she falls in love with him. Why should she fall in love with him? Can he dance? No. Can he sing? No. Can he tell funny stories? No, he would never debase Miranda by telling her a dirty joke. He simply seems to think his mere presence, removing her from the outside influences of the greater world, including the man she seems to be seeing (Kenneth More whom we see the back of his head once because all 35-minutes of his role got cut to get the film down to 2 hours), will lead her to fall in love with him.

The movement of this is the kind of thing that one would expect from such a story. She resists him completely until there’s some kind of limited rapprochement where they decide to give in slightly to each other. She’ll start eating and talking to him if he gives her an exit date of four weeks from then. They talk more, some thin friendliness forms between them as Miranda accepts her situation to a certain degree, as long as she has an end date to look forward to which she paints on a wall as a calendar.

The standout moments are some great bits of tension, the showstopper being when Freddie finally allows Miranda to bathe. He takes her into the house proper, upstairs to the bathroom with shuttered windows, no glass, and no doorhandle, and lets her bathe on her own when, coincidentally, Freddie’s neighbor decides to stop by and introduce himself. The ensuing few minutes is wonderfully tense as Freddie tries to get the neighbor to leave without arousing any suspicion and Miranda, quickly tied up by Freddie the moment the doorbell rang, tries to get attention somehow. There’s a moment in the middle of this where the neighbor reveals a priest hole in the wall that never gets brought up again, which makes me wonder if there’s a payoff for that in the three-hour original cut that we’ll never see. I suppose I could read the book by John Fowles and perhaps find out, but nah.

Anyway, things escalate because Miranda predictably does not fall for Freddie, and Freddie breaks because of this. The scene where this happens is really fascinating, though. This needs a vehicle on which to ride the divide between them, and the film uses a discussion over modern art and literature to do it. Using a copy of Catcher in the Rye by Salinger and an art book with a painting by Picasso as its cover as the fulcrum, Miranda gingerly and inexpertly navigates a small discussion about the merits of both with Freddie who finds Catcher insulting since Holden Caufield is a spoiled brat who doesn’t realize or appreciate what he has, a level of wealth and comfort that Freddie yearned for throughout his poor childhood, and the revealed truths of Picasso’s shapes, which Freddie rejects because it doesn’t look real and her interpretation is obviously just regurgitation of what she heard in school. This is the kind of divide that Freddie thought he could bridge but her combination of unintentional condescension and having the “wrong” opinions flairs him up.

The ending is both tragic and chilling, the sort of thing that could have only happened in the waning days of the Hays Code with Hitchcock’s lead in something like Psycho or even Vertigo. It doesn’t have the kind of just morality that the Hays Office imposed on movie endings, and it creates this different feeling that really must have still felt shocking in the mid-60s.

Even with the different production location, Wyler treats the film visually like any other. He gets his two-tiered sets, interesting compositions, and strong performances (helped in no small part by slightly torturing Eggers during production), but he also resorts to crosscutting closeups more in this than I think I’ve ever seen him do. I don’t know if its because he’s reacting to the rise of television and its invasion upon cinematic language or if he needed to lower costs on longer dialogue scenes, choosing to film one side at a time rather then doing dozens of takes to get longer, wider shots all at once, but the inclusion is noticeable.

Still, this is a seedy thriller that gets under the skin. Anchored and entirely carried by two fine performances from two fine, young, English actors, The Collector is a solidly good and tense time at the movies.

Rating: 3.5/4