Rate THE COLLECTOR (1965)

I gave The Collector a 7. Above average, it didn't wow, though Samantha Eggar was excellent in it, as was, needless to say, Terence Stamp; and expert direction for both of them from William Wyler. Yet the story felt artificial to me, not quite real; and to some extent, at times, the characters didn't quite convince me, either. The movie felt too much about ideas, not enough about people and how they really are; how they,--we, really--actually live. The dialogue between the captured woman and her captor, a not so alpha male, played like a series of essays and meditations on the State Of England Today, which is to say as of more than a half-century ago; and as embodied by two young people, with some nasty pathology thrown into the mix.

As it's much of the time Big Ideas transposed into human drama I couldn't bring myself to like the lovely Miss Eggar nor hate the deeply insecure edgy-quirky Stamp sufficiently to ever get involved, at an emotional level, in the plight of either of them. In this The Collector plays "very Sixties", by itself not a bad thing; and yet not that good, either. That the film feels so cerebral doesn't give the viewer much chance to simply sit back and watch it as a good movie, something to experience, and also, something about experience. Something's missing, and it's a deeply primal something. Maybe it's a certain lack of heart in the storytelling. Whatever it it, I respect the film and those who worked on it for the effort and high intelligence that went into their work, however I can't bring myself to care much for the finished product aside from the exquisite skill that went into its making.

7/10