The Collector (1965 Film Review)

1965 Columbia Pictures
Directed by: William Wyler; Written by: Stanley Mann and John Kohn (Based upon the 1963 Novel by: John Fowles)
Starring: Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar
MPAA Rating: NR; Running Time: 119 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 8/10

After Freddy wins a Thames-load of money betting on football...er, soccer, he buys an old mansion out in the middle of nowhere. The socially awkward and introverted Freddy collects butterflies, but he's grown bored of that. Now, he wants to collect Miranda.

I'm a big fan of author, John Fowles, and I think 1963's The Collector might be his masterwork (It's between that and The Magus). The first half of Fowles' book comes from Freddy's perspective. He's a loathsome individual, and not exactly a reliable narrator, as he justifies his kidnapping and enslavement of Miranda in his basement. The second, recontextualizing half, though, comes from Miranda's perspective, in epistolary form. Overall, The Collector is an incredibly complex work, from which myriad meanings and themes have been implied by readers, some heavily conflicting. Adapting such a perplexing work is no easy task, but director, William Wyler, famous for directing the classic Ben-Hur six years before, is up for it in this 1965 cinematic interpretation. Wyler drops Fowles' perspective change narrative take for a straightforward framework that is nevertheless a faithful cinematic telling of Fowles seminal novel.

Most of Wyler's heavy-lifting here comes in pushing Terrence Stamp, as Freddy, and Samantha Eggar  as Miranda, bringing out incredible performances from this duo who are the sole actors in the film for the majority of its runtime. Stamp is incredibly creepy as a man who can't grasp the abstract, is infuriated at the way Miranda can find deeper themes in things like The Catcher in The Rye or a Picasso painting, as he finds the former crass and meaningless and the latter to simply be bad drawings of people. The film functions as a fine piece of psychological horror, and Stamp is highly effective, failing to see Miranda's humanity because he fails to see humanity in general. Meanwhile, the beguiling Samantha Eggar, who I fell in love with when I was a small child watching Doctor Doolittle (NOT the Eddie Murphy one, the 1967 Rex Harrison one because I AM OLD) is incredible here, as a young woman who was just figuring things out when this monster came out of the fog, knocked her out, and threw her in his basement. It's important to note that the film follows the book in that Freddy has no sexual interest in Miranda...or possibly anyone. He only wants to collect her and understand her as he would a butterfly. When Miranda realizes this, she feels a strange empathy for Freddy and his inability to connect on a human level...though her number one goal is always to escape. The Collector is incredibly complicated and there's really no way to communicate the depth found in the 300 pages of Fowles' novel in two hours. With that said, this is a special film, and Wyler did a phenomenal job with the material, standing up for and not shying away from the book's bleak ending. With Wylers's work, excellent production values, Maurice Jarre's fantastic score, and top-tier, award-winning performances from Stamp and Eggar, The Collector is not to be missed by psychological horror fans, or fans of classic cinema in general.