the leading man is my tpye

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Best movie ever!

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I found "The Collector" simply fascinating. On the one hand, it is about a man who is a social outcast and abducts a girl with whom he is obsessed, in an effort to make her love him. He just wants to be seen and heard and cared about for who he is, despite his shortcomings. On the other hand, it is about a twisted, sick, manipulative, self-centered person who uses force and coercion to try and get what he wants. The dynamics of these two opposing aspects of the protagonist's character make you alternately empathize with his lonely plight and then recoil in horror at his cold stony interior. Terence Stamp, who I have known from his later roles as a villain, does an admirable job as the sociopathic young man, going from vulnerable and frail to keen and clever to hurtfully honest. Definitely a must see movie that will make you think and provide for some interesting after movie analysis.

Director William Wyler's adaptation of a novel by John Fowles concerning a disturbed young man's obsession with a beautiful woman who he eventually kidnaps and places in a basement room. The film is solidly made and acted and while it is interesting to watch, it is never gripping or compelling. It doesn't have any of the sordid messiness that the material requires and would have given it the edge it needs. Wyler's solid direction is at odds with the material. It's too neat and tidy. Samantha Eggar is a standout despite the fact that the ending feels like a cop out.I was interested in seeing "The Collector" only because it was directed by William Wyler who was one of the top directors in Hollywood from the 1930's through the 1950s. "The Collector" is fascinating because the story itself is a bit perverted and falls into the realm of Hitchcock, not Wyler (I kept thinking about Hitchcock's "Psycho" throughout). Why would Wyler, a solid veteran of Hollywood Movie Workhorses, be drawn to a dark film about an egotistical "head-case" who collects butterflies and decides that he wants to collect a beautiful woman he has long admired and keep her to himself? I have not found anything about his reasons but his involvement makes "The Collector" worth a look. Certainly, nothing about the story makes it worthy. What might have seemed daring and cutting edge back in 1965 now seems tame and has been done numerous times and better (the film is like "Misery" with the gender roles reversed). Nothing about what happens between the beautiful Miranda (a painfully beautiful and likable Samantha Eggar) and creepy Freddy (Terence Stamp) is really unique or even very interesting. But "The Collector" does hold your interest. The movie's opening moments are confusing. Wyler's attempts to establish Freddie as a character does not work completely enough to substantiate the act of kidnapping. Once Freddie has kidnapped Miranda and places her in a dungeon like setting, "The Collector" starts to come together. It becomes a character study of a demented, delusional loser who still pines for love and his prisoner's attempt to some how get out of the situation alive. In the scenes between Miranda and Freddie, Wyler's strength shines and Eggar is particularly good. She's lovely to look at and you can certainly understand why Freddie is attracted to her. Eggar's eyes show us how she is trying to assess the situation for an escape while Freddie keeps changing his methods and reasons for holding her captive. Without Eggar or a comparable actress, "The Collector" wouldn't work at all. It is too bad that what limited success the film does achieve falls squarely on Eggar's shoulders because Terence Stamp's Freddie is the reason the film fails to compel. It's not necessarily Stamp's fault. He is a great actor and though he is playing a stiff (or a demented dork), Stamp is never stiff or dull. "The Collector" simply does not establish how we are meant to feel toward Freddie until the very end when a piece of throwaway narration finally lets us know that he is psychotic (probably a sociopath). I doubt the intention by Wyler's was to create this ambiguity. If the film had made Freddie's character clear, then we would feel more peril for Miranda and her situation. As it plays out, we are confused by him and never really know if he is dangerous or just a bit of a lonely nut looking for love. This confusion elicited some seemingly contradictory and expected reactions. Take for example the scene where Miranda is tied up in the bathroom while the neighbor visits Freddie. When Miranda turns the bathtub water on so it overflows I found myself actually not wanting the neighbor to notice. I was actually on Freddie's side for some reason. If Hitchcock had made "The Collector" then I could see him doing something like this. He's the type of director who would have loved to have the audience side with the psycho but he would have made Miranda somehow unlikeable. In Wyler's film, he has not convinced us of Stamp's true nature (the upbeat, chirpy music that underscores many of Stamp's scenes certainly does not help). Therefore, the film feels uncertain and unfocused and it kills any tension.In the end, it comes down to the direction. As good as Wyler is, material like this is not something that is within his expertise. Perhaps he was, in his late career, trying to do something new. Having been a long time film maker, he might have sensed the changing times and tried to stay relevant. It's a worthy effort. "The Collector" required a director with a vision to create a sense of constant menace. The material should not have been smartened up the way Wyler does it but played for it's pulpy, scary aspects. Hitchcock could have done it. Certainly Polanski could have too and his "Rosemary's Baby" just three years later managed to be lot of what "The Collector" could have been.

Terence Stamp is fabulous in the part of a brooding etymologist who kidnaps Samantha Eggar in this 1965 weird picture. Everyone knows that he has no intention whatsoever of releasing his true love. In fact, he has been watching her for quite a while. Along the way, Eggar tries to escape to no avail. There is no sex between the two and the piece becomes one of sheer boredom. It is almost laughable in certain scenes.In fact, Eggar developing pneumonia during all this is probably a welcomed relief.Is Stamp another Scarlett? Does he actually realize that Eggar was really never for him?

Intriguing premise— a really repressed guy adds a captive girl to his butterfly collection. The trouble is—as others point out—there's not enough movie material to fill the two hours running time. Besides, director Wyler likes to draw out scenes, which further slows the pace. I also agree that the dense psychological material is better suited to a stage production than a movie screen. Nevertheless, there are some interesting undercurrents to the story, morbid though it is.I want to pick up on a neglected psychological aspect of the movie. Consider, that is, how Freddie (Stamp) is first portrayed. As a person he appears more pitiable than wicked, even after abducting the gorgeous Miranda (Eggar). Instead of molesting her as we expect, he treats her with surprising respect. So, right away, we're wondering what's going on with this guy. As it turns out, the problem for Freddie is that he simply doesn't understand the concept of courtship. Instead, he's racked by a sense of inadequacy and inferiority that prevents him from winning Miranda's affection in a normal way. As a result, he approaches the object of his fascination in the only way he knows— by sticking chloroform in her mouth and sealing her in a figurative bottle.Now one aspect of sealing Miranda away is to remove her from the social context that makes Freddie feel inadequate. Note, for example, how negatively he refers to her " la-de-dah" friends and her higher social class. Note too how rigidly gentlemanly he is toward her. In his mind, he's made her into a queen deserving a kind of gallantry (he always dresses in suits; and, ironically, it's only after losing this "respect" that she's in real danger). So, if only he can make her love him—if only she would "try"—his adequacy would be proved, and just as importantly, he would qualify as her social equal despite his lowly background. However, unknown to him, he also has a blind spot that turns out to be a lethal one.That overriding defect is especially revealed in one scene. There, he wants to prove his intellectual qualities to Miranda by discussing the novel Catcher in the Rye. But despite an honest effort and some flailing, he fails to get beyond superficials, and for interesting reasons. He's simply unable to put himself in the lead character's place and see the world from the novelist's standpoint. In short, here as elsewhere, he lacks empathy for others. That is, he can't imagine anyone's feelings beyond his own-- not too surprising considering what he's done to Miranda (he tends to her material needs but nothing more). But once his intellectual effort fails, notice his fall-back position. He insists emotionally that people should really be satisfied with their lot in life, whatever it is. For the movie, this seems like Freddie's moment of self-discovery. To heck now with trying to impress others. He should be satisfied with what he is, and not care what others think. Thus, he finishes off the discussion by insisting that the book is bunk since the lead character (Holden) really has nothing to complain about in the first place. Freddie could just as well be speaking now for himself.Thus, having failed to empathize, he retreats back to an enclosed position of self- satisfaction. In short, he rejects his one stab at being a normal human—the effort to identify with others. At the same time, this sense of satisfaction means he no longer has to prove himself to his social betters. From now on, he will seek out women of his own social class. But more ominously, he can now feel content in being nothing more than the "collector" he has been. Thus, the collector settles into being merely one more objectified thing among the human and insect "objects" making up his self-enclosed world. And what formerly invited pity, now turns into a hunger for ever more human specimens as the chilling last scene shows. So what started out as a focused desire for one object, Miranda, turns into a stalker's generalized appetite for ever more quarry. Thus is a serial killer born.What's surprising is that we keep expecting the movie to be about sex, as attractive as Miranda is. But it's not. Instead it's about one very repressed individual and how his obsession with one person evolves into a serial pattern. I also suspect that author Fowles is getting in a dig at Britain's famously rigid class system since Freddie's initial sense of inadequacy feeds on class distinctions. However that may be, the film admirably refuses to sensationalize its morbid subject matter. And after years of sensationalized slasher films, that can be seen as no small accomplishment. Thus, despite its many well-reported drawbacks, the movie continues to fascinate.