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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 29, No. 1. 1966.

Strangely compelling

Strangely compelling

"The Collector" was banned in 1965 by the Film Censorship Board of Appeal. It had been passed by the Film Censor—with cuts—but was banned on appeal against one of the cuts.

  • • The film won Best Actor and Best Actress awards at the Cannes Film Festival.
  • • New Zealand is the first country to ban the film.
  • • Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar were nominated for Academy awards.
  • • Director William Wyler is a three-time Oscar winner.

This review is from the top Australian student newspaper "Lot's Wife" (Monash University) and is reprinted here because we believe New Zealand students should be aware of the nature and content of the banned film. Ed.

William Wyler is perhaps Hollywood's master "sicky." And "The Collector" (Embassy) could be his sickest film.

I Found it an interesting and strangely compelling experience.

In style and form it is quite conventional, with one only interesting technical point. Early in the story Freddy, the collector, has a flashback, which establishes for the audience exactly who and what he is and how he comes to be in the position to do what he does.

When I say he has a flashback I mean he remembers or relives in his mind the incidents which provide the clue to his character.

The flashback, once upon a time, you will recall, was the filmmaker's device for filling us in on information effecting subsequent action. Today the flashback comes to us as reminiscenee on the part of a character. A better way, I think.

Here the flashback is in an almost sepia black and white which marks it clearly from the colour of the main film. Those people who couldn't tell straight story action from the daydreams Guido indulged in to "escape" from painful experiences in "8½" will appreciate this slightly excessive under-lining on the part of the more considerate Mr. Wyler.

The real interest in the film comes from its content, particularly the nature of its protagonists.

For here is no mere abduction, and not even a case of psycho captures girl. The reason for the abduction ties in a complex of individual character, social situation and stroke of fortune.

Freddy, the main character (Terrence Stamp) is a butterfly collector, not just because he likes the look of butterflies. I suspect, but because he is a boy from a working class home who is get ting on in the new one-class world of today and is desperately ashamed of his background. Not for anything intrinsic in it, of course, but because its narrow horizons and limited cultural opportunities deny him the social acceptance he secretly wants from his workmates and subsequently the girl who has been the centre of his dreams from childhood.

Butterflies satisfy his poorly articulated craving for beauty without making demands on him to compete at a cultural or intellectual level.

The film opens on his abduction but it really begins with his winning a fortune on the football pools. This stroke of chance places him in a position to enjoy a mode of life formerly only accessible to persons of different birth and less fundamental education.

The author has gone to some pains to highlight the difference between Freddy and his world. In the bank he is pathetically shy and aloof from his more secure and rowdier mates. Throughout his relationship with Melinda (Samantha Egger) he fails to communicate with her at a satisfactory level because he simply cannot speak her language.

His only neighbour in the Tudor country house he buys himself is a retired Colonel, the perfect Old Public School Boy, replete with horses and dogs.

Melinda is for him both the cherished object of his most secret and urgent desire, the crown of his aspirations, and the living testimony to his impotence in regard to the success of that desire.

What he seeks from her is love. Yet love to him means the satisfaction of his abject, isolate, childish greed for beauty.

It is precisely because she is "above his station"—daughter of a "ladidah doctor," as he often reminds her—that he desires her and yet, because of his own acute and very sad sense of inadequacy and intellectual inferiority he cannot accept the offer of her love, even when she submits herself to him willingly.

Desperately seeking love and prepared to pay all for it, he still cannot escape from the nagging suspicion that everything she says and does is designed to get at him, to show up his inferiority.

The film, to my mind, should finish with her death. It doesn't. But even with his eyes on easier game, and a bird closer to his own cage, one feels that Freddy will remain ever the ironic failure.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the film is that it is a story which could only have been filmed now, in post-Profumo Britain. It is surely not merely by accident that Miss Egger is physically a Christine Keeler type, And the assumptions about Augio-Saxon sexual attitudes which the film works on would not have been publicly accepted before the scandal broke, as articles by John Osborne and Colin Wilson at the time tended to emphasise.

The cruelty, guilt obsessed bawdiness of English sexuality are hinted at in "Tom Jones", but "The Collector" reveals the precise mixture of counterbalancing forces propelling the Englishman into bed, the admixture of lust and guilt, driving desire and impotence of execution which Osborne at least would have us believe is typical.