A House in the Country

The Collector is a good grisly thriller that never rises to the challenge of becoming something more. Contrived to leave viewers feeling scared silly rather than profoundly shaken, this tournament of terror spells instant stardom for two relatively uncelebrated English performers, Samantha Eggar and Terence Stamp, although Stamp is seriously miscast. From a taut beginning to a breath-stopping climax, the drama seizes attention, yet misses nearly all the depth and subtlety of the small sinister bestseller on which it is based.

In his 1963 novel, a core sampling from that vein of irrational hostility that separates servants from masters, haves from havenots, Britain's John Fowles explored the miasmal psychology of an impotent, whey-faced nonentity named Clegg. A municipal clerk whose warped dreams brutally but clearly mock the aspirations of the newly affluent New People of the English working class, Clegg collects butterflies in his off-hours until he wins $200,000 in the football pool and can suddenly indulge his wildest fancies. He buys a remote country house, converts its vaulted cellar into a more or less gilded cage, and kidnaps Miranda, a vivacious London art student whose beauty has enraptured him from afar. "He is an empty space designed as a human," his astonished captive confides to her diary, "slow, unimaginative, lifeless, like zinc white."

Stamp plays Clegg more as a psychotic Adonis. The winsome boyish airs that made him a perfect choice for the movie version of Billy Budd (1962) are a crucial drawback when he has to reason maniacally: "There'd be a bloomin' lot more of this if enough people had the time and money." His fixed stare and halting accents never quite cancel out the suspicion that he is just the sort of menace a comely bird might yearn to be imprisoned by--a vaguely Heathcliffian introvert reviving a Bronte romance in modern dress. Thus Actress Eggar dominates the film, not by better acting but by seeming hand-in-glove with her role. Plucky, tenacious, she proceeds moment by moment from incredulity to seductiveness to violence to the awful realization that she is merely a bright ephemeral at the mercy of a man who extinguishes living beauty as a pastime.

To further glamorize a morbid theme, Director William Wyler daubs it somewhat irrelevantly in full color. Yet his sure professionalism makes every important scene insidiously effective. The sense of stifling confinement is established at the outset when Clegg, in a van, stalks his victim toward a narrow byway where he can still her screams with chloroform. Wyler coolly, almost perversely, manipulates audience sympathy when Clegg tries to fob off an unexpected visitor while water seeps down from an upstairs bathroom where Miranda, lashed and gagged, has made the tub overflow. Later, she attacks her jailer with a shovel one dismal English night, a bid for freedom that ends as a muddy, bloody wrestling match. Though Author Fowles's harrowing final chapters are only capsuled on film, The Collector, even with its intelligence and insight curtailed, still pays off handsomely as a shocker sure to quicken the pulse of any anxious working girl who has to walk home unescorted.

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