The Collector Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.0

The Collector Blu-ray Movie Review

Getting to Know You (Whether or Not I Want To)

Reviewed by Michael Reuben November 4, 2011

Today there's almost a "ho-hum" quality to stories about men who abduct and mistreat women (usually fatally) to compensate for their inability to form "normal" relationships. Thanks to the combined efforts of novelists like Thomas Harris and Stieg Larsson, filmmakers like Jonathan Demme and Michael Mann (among many others) and TV shows like Law and Order: SVU (still going strong), such predators have been reduced to stock characters. Now it's a question of how lurid their fetishes, how brazen their exploits, how gory their handiwork and how loudly their victims scream. The characters' inner world, when it's explored at all, is parceled out with the tidiness of the psychiatric explanation that concludes Hitchcock's Psycho (and doesn't really explain all that much).

Forty-six years ago, director William Wyler, one of the great talents who helped build Hollywood, took a different approach. Already a three-time Oscar-winning director (for Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives and the widescreen epic, Ben-Hur), Wyler made a choice that a contemporary studio executive would consider career suicide: He made a two-hour drama about two characters, including long stretches with no dialogue. A few minor characters were needed to advance the story, but their screen time was minimal. Indeed, when Wyler got into the editing room, he cut one of them altogether, even though he loved the scenes. They just didn't belong. (Unfortunately, they don't appear to have survived.)

Two hours with the same two people might sound dull, but not in the hands of a craftsman of Wyler's caliber. Working from a largely faithful adapatation of John Fowles's novel, The Collector (which has nothing to do with the 2009 film of the same name), the director put the kidnapper and his abductee through an increasingly intimate series of exchanges, bargains, conflicts and confrontations, until each one reveals who and what they are. The result may take a little more patience on the part of the audience, but the ultimate effect is more disturbing, because you feel like you've actually become acquainted with people who are, for just that reason, much harder to shake.

It didn't hurt that Wyler cast the picture perfectly (which is, of course, an essential part of a director's job). Terence Stamp may be more familiar to contemporary audiences as the comical villain Siegfried in the Steve Carell Get Smart or the doleful Pekwarsky in Wanted (not to mention General Zod in the first two Superman films), but in his youth he had delicately expressive features and the same intensely focused eyes, which made him ideal as Freddie Clegg, the shy and withdrawn bank clerk who suddenly finds himself in a position to indulge what had previously been only fantasies. Samantha Eggar, who would later give a memorably twisted performance in David Cronenberg's The Brood, was the perfect age and physical type to play the object of Freddie's desire, and Wyler kept her isolated and on edge throughout the production so that she quickly became Miranda Grey, the young art student Freddie kidnaps. Both Stamp and Eggar received top acting honors at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival, and Eggar was nominated for an Oscar for her harrowing portrayal.

The film opens with Freddie (Stamp) alone in a field with his butterfly net, pursuing the hobby from which the novel and the film take their name. On this particular day, his wanderings bring Freddie to an isolated stone house in the country that's been uninhabited for years. As he explains in voiceover, Freddie decides to buy it on the spot. As we later learn, he can afford to do so, because he happens to have won a large sum on a "football pool" (something like a lottery), and it's made him sufficiently independent to leave the bank clerk's job where, like many shy people, he was frequently an object of mockery. (One suspects he's been that his whole life.)

The next thing we know, Freddie is following, then kidnapping Miranda Grey (Eggar), using the time-honored method of chloroform and a nondescript van. It quickly becomes clear that Freddie has been admiring Miranda from afar for a long time. Exactly when "admiring" crossed over into "stalking" is hard to pin down, but it probably occurred around the point when Miranda moved from Reading to London to attend art school -- and Freddie moved with her.

It is, of course, easy to equate Freddie's activities as a collector of lepidoptera to his taking of a human captive, and Miranda will eventually do just that. But does the equation really explain anything? Freddie may have adapted some of the techniques he learned chasing butterflies to the elaborate human abduction that is the subject of the film, but his motivation comes from an entirely different place. Even Freddie doesn't fully understand it, which is why the film isn't just about a kidnapping. It's about Miranda desperately trying to understand Freddie and what he wants from her.

In the process Miranda uncovers layer after contradictory layer in this strangely prim young man in the blazer and pocket protector, who can switch from pleasant to sinister at a moment's notice. Freddie says he loves her and want her to love him, but what exactly does that mean? He claims it doesn't involve sex, and yet part of him is very obviously aroused, even though he suppresses it as best he can. When Miranda tries to establish rapport through the interest he seems to take in her art, the result is an ugly argument over modern painting and literature, all of which Freddie thinks is a scam. You can see the confusion on Miranda's face, as she desperately grasps at understanding Freddie's point of view, because her life truly depends on getting through to him.

Director Wyler was noted for his skill at placing people and objects in a frame to maintain visual interest, and that ability is put to good use in The Collector, where so much of the film takes place at Freddie's refitted farm house. The room that serves as Miranda's spacious cell, as well as its vault-like outer enclosure and the stairway to the outer world, have been carefully designed to create multiple heights, surfaces and angles, so that they eye never wearies of the same location. Midway through the film, Wyler stages a quietly masterful sequence worthy of Hitchcock (and specially scripted for the film, since it wasn't in Fowles's novel), when a country neighbor (Maurice Dallimore) drops by unannounced while Miranda is spending a rare moment in the main house taking a bath. Freddie has to improvise repeatedly while the tiresome old man keeps chattering, obviously in no hurry to return home to his wife of many years. Eventually Freddie tells the neighbor his girlfriend is staying with him for the weekend. "You know how it is", Freddie says, in a confidential tone. "I remember how it was", the old man says ruefully. He never suspects that the young man he's addressing hasn't the faintest clue what he's talking about.

The Collector Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Image's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray of The Collector can be described in similar terms to those applicable to Absence of Malice, another Sony catalogue title being released by Image on the same date: It's the kind of image that is usually described as "soft" by viewers who experience most films on video and as "film-like" by those (like me) who grew up seeing movies projected on film. It's a detailed image with colors that are saturated (but not overly so), good black levels, natural-looking grain and no apparent attempt to modernize the photographic style or process the texture to create "pop".

Having recently read a reviewer's dismissal of the Absence of Malice Blu-ray as little better than a DVD (a conclusion I don't share), I took some additional time to examine Sony's 2002 DVD edition of The Collector, from which I drew several conclusions. First, the Blu-ray is based on a new transfer that either used a better element or involved significant restoration. The difference is immediately evident in the titles, which, on the DVD, showed noticeable print damage that is nowhere evident on the Blu-ray. Indeed, the source material for the Blu-ray is in excellent shape (or beautifully restored), with the exception of a missing few frames occurring at app. 1:48:40. This must be a flaw in the original cut negative, because it has been there in every version I know. (If anyone knows of a version without this "jump", please contact me.)

Second, the Blu-ray reflects accurate 1.85:1 framing, whereas the DVD was slightly windowboxed and optically squeezed. It also was missing a small amount of picture information at left and right. This sometimes happened with DVDs, and it frequently wouldn't be noticed except in direct comparison to a superior source.

Third, the black levels, detail and color differentiations on the Blu-ray are so obviously superior that anyone who can't see the difference needs their equipment calibrated, new equipment, an eye test or a serious education in what film does and doesn't look like. This is an excellent Blu-ray of a great filmmaker's work. It's probably truer to what Wyler shot than most viewers saw projected in the cinema in 1965. Dislike it, if you must, as a matter of personal taste, but don't fault the Blu-ray.

The Collector Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Collector was released in mono, and the Blu-ray features what amounts to a mono soundtrack presented as PCM 2.0. The film has a haunting, harpsichord-dominated score by Maurice Jarre that is all the more effective for being used sparingly. Long portions of the soundtrack contain no more than dialogue, which is clearly rendered, and essential sound effects. The track's dynamic range is perfectly normal for the era and more than sufficient for its purposes.

The Collector Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Sony's 2002 DVD had no supplements other than the film's trailer and two bonus trailers (Panic Room and Enough).

• Theatrical Trailer (HD; 1.85:1; 2:50): If anything, the trailer overplays Freddie's menacing qualities, but that's marketing for you.

The Collector Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The conventional wisdom on William Wyler is that his brand of filmmaking fell out of fashion in the years after The Collector, but it's probably more accurate to say that anyone as closely associated with the old studio system as Wyler lost a substantial measure of credibility when that system collapsed in the Seventies. Wyler's last film, The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970), was considered a failure, and yet I remember it being as skillful and disturbing (in a completely different way) as The Collector. Maybe Columbia will hand it off to Image some day. (You can be sure they'll keep Funny Girl for themselves.) In the meantime, let's be grateful that The Collector was treated with the respect it deserves and smile indulgently when the analog-challenged crowd complains that, "Ooh! This should look sharper!" Highly recommended for fans of the Old School.