The Collector (1965)

The Collector is a British-American thriller film first released in 1965, directed by William Wyler.  The film is based on a novel by John Fowles and stars Terence Stamp, Samantha Eggar, Mona Washbourne, Maurice Dallimore and Allyson Ames.  It has also been released under the title: The Butterfly Collector.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Having won a fortune on the football pools, Freddie Clegg, a modest bank clerk, decides to buy a solitary house in the middle of the English countryside.  It is the perfect location for him to pursue his hobby – catching butterflies.  It is also the ideal setting for something else he has in mind.  One day, he kidnaps a young arts student, Miranda Grey, and takes her back to his secluded house.  He locks her up in his cellar, intending to keep her there until such time as she has fallen in love with him.  Freddie has some strange notions when it comes to women.  Still, he treats his captive well and Miranda realises that her only hope is to play along with her deranged captor.  But as the weeks pass, Freddie’s resolve to hold onto his prisoner shows no sign of weakening and Miranda wonders if she will ever see the outside world again. Then, to her horror, she discovers what Freddie does in his spare time...

Towards the end of his remarkable career, the American filmmaker William Wyler showed a late flourishing of brilliance, evidenced by the lavish epic Ben-Hur (1959) and this comparatively modest adaptation of an early John Fowles novel.   The Collector clearly belongs to the psycho-thriller phenomenon that came in the wake of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), but it stands out from the rest (many of which can be written off as exploitation trash) because it is better scripted, better directed and much better acted.  Wyler’s direction earned an Oscar nomination whilst the two leads, Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar, both won awards at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965.  The film, which is pretty well a two-handed drama, is one of Wyler’s most compelling, and also one of his most poetic, thanks in no small measure to Maurice Jarre’s evocative score and the atmospheric (often dreamlike) photography.

Whereas most psycho-thrillers of this era had an implied sadistic edge and tended to concentrate heavily on the physical violence, Wyler’s film is much more subtle and probes the psychology of the two characters. the victim and the tormenter, with far greater depth and realism.   The reason why the film is so effective, and so disturbing, is because the main protagonists and their predicament are believable.  Just as Anthony Perkins had in Psycho, Terence Stamp (in one of his first major screen roles) succeeds in making his character sympathetic and frightening, but, above all, real.  Freddie Clegg is a typically British take on Norman Bates – a wimpish bank clerk who is sexually repressed (no doubt because of an abnormal relationship with his mother) and hateful of the class system that has given him an inferiority complex and several crates of chips on each shoulder - in other words, the archetypal working class Englishman.  The story of Freddie and Miranda is effectively a vicious reworking of the Beauty and the Beast fairytale, except that instead of a handsome prince we have a pallid faced nerd whose main pastime is massacring butterflies and whose only redeeming feature is an abject loathing for Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (although some would argue the latter marks him out as a saint).

It is interesting that the psycho-thriller genre arrived on the scene just as feminism and the sexual revolution were beginning to impact greatly on contemporary society.  Was the genre so popular because it reasserted the dominance of the male over the female, or because it subverted this universal truth, by showing that men’s aggressive behaviour towards women was the product of deep-seated psychological flaws?  Or maybe the genre is a reaction to out-dated notions of marriage.  Could the rapport between aggressor and victim be interpreted as an allegory for that arbitrary coupling of husband and wife, couples trapped in a sadomasochistic ritual of mutual psychological and physical cruelty that can only end badly?   Another more prosaic possibility is that the genre is simply trying to alert audiences to the dangers of this new era of permissiveness, one in which vulnerable women are more likely to become the victims of unbridled male lust.   Whatever the reason, psycho films like The Collector were extraordinarily popular with filmmakers and audiences from the mid-60s to the mid-70s, especially in Great Britain.  Just what does this say about the British psyche...?

© James Travers 2009

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