Reeling Backward: "The Collector" (1965)

"The Collector" is an early iteration on the cinematic trend of serial killer as main character, in which we're nudged to identify with the evildoer as much as his victim. It was controversial in its time, despite three Academy Award nominations, though now this sort of thing is quite common.

Hannibal Lecter is a bona fide franchise unto himself these days, with books and movies/TV shows of diminishing returns, artistically if not financially. According to Thomas Harris' own well-established timeline, Hannibal would be in his 80s by now -- his dining habits more threatened by tooth decay than law enforcement intrusions, perhaps.

In one of his early roles, Terrence Stamp plays Freddie Clegg, a young former bank clerk and amateur entomologist. A timid social outcast among his fellow Brits with an almost childlike grasp on social interaction, Freddie won £71,000 in a football pool -- about $1.5 million in today's dollars -- and spends his days carefree with a butterfly net in his hands, catching and killing them and placing them in elaborate displays.

With more resources, his ambitions grow grander and grimmer.

During his wanderings he stumbles upon a magnificent ancient country home and, finding a stone basement with a large hidden room, decides on the spot to buy it. According to the narration by Freddie, he more or less intended to use it so he could kidnap Miranda Grey, a girl from his hometown of Reading, now an art student in London, upon whom he developed a schoolboy crush. In his delusional thinking, by forcing their proximity she could get to know him better and, thereby, fall in love with him.

Needless to say, Miranda is disinclined to fall into the arms of her abductor.

The film, one of the last directed by William Wyler, was based on the debut novel of John Fowles, who went on to pen "The Magus," "The French Lieutenant's Woman" and other notable works. ("Magus" was actually written first, published third.) 

It is unread by me, but from what I've gathered the book jumps from Freddie's first-person perspective to Miranda's and back again. The screenplay by Stanley Mann, John Kohn and an uncredited Terry Southern follows the novel pretty closely, and went on to earn an Oscar nomination, as did Wyler and Samantha Eggar, who plays Miranda.

It's interesting that Eggar's performance was recognized -- she actually won the Golden Globe -- and Stamp's was not, as he is quite affecting as the naive-yet-chilling Freddie. Through the story we see the evolution from disturbed young man to malevolent force, and how he views himself as a victim even as his proclivities as a victimizer are nourished through this experience.

An interesting side note is that Stamp and Eggar knew each other from acting school, and he actually asked her on a date and was rebuffed. Wyler made a point of ignoring her on set while giving all of his attention to Stamp, in an obvious ploy to heighten her sense of alienation.

After the rote opening of Miranda's abduction, the story sets into a pattern. Freddie opens the door to the basement, which vaguely resembles the interior of a medieval church, dressed to the nines in an expensive suit and bearing food, books, art supplies, etc. The room has been outfitted with nice furniture, chests of clothes and toiletries, with a single heat lamp to fight the chill. He behaves like the concierge of an upscale hotel, asking after her health and inquiring of her wants, and trying to deflect the most obvious question at hand.

After her initial shock, she tries various methods of escape, learns his true motives, and negotiates her way down to 11 days of captivity. Needless to say when the time comes, Freddie decides to extend her visit a little longer. After she makes half-hearted attempts at friendship, he scorns her for trying to fool him. Finally Miranda tries to seduce Freddie -- who's almost certainly a virgin -- and he loses all respect for her. No matter what she does, she loses.

There's one wonderfully tense scene where a neighbor of Freddie's comes by to introduce himself and highlight some of the architectural aspects of his new home, such as a hidey-hole where wayward monks were hidden. (We assume this will become a key plot point, but it never happens.) Meanwhile, Miranda is tied up naked in the upstairs bathroom, and manages to use one foot to turn on the bathtub tab and flood the room. We watch the puddle grow larger, pool in the landing, and wander toward the speaking figures below. Terrific Hitchcock-ian tension.

Miranda finally gets the upper hand and manages to bash Freddie in the head with a shovel, but can't bring herself to deliver the final blow. He recovers and she is recaptured, and things lead to a dark denouement.

The coda is downright chilling: Freddie is tooling around London in his box van again, narrating. He ponders whether things turning out poorly was his fault, but decides all the blame belongs to Miranda, with her fancy friends and la-dee-dah ideas. He resolves to try again with somebody closer to his own social background and station, and we watch a young nurse walk past, unawares.

"The Collector" works as a character study and crime procedural, though it's not necessarily a great piece of filmmaking. Story-wise it exists on the superficial level and never explores deeper and potentially more disturbing topics, such as male/female gender roles or Freddie's upbringing. But it's still a worthwhile precursor to a killer theme that's become much more popular today.

Reeling Backward: "Eye of the Needle" (1981)

I first encountered Ken Follett's novel "Eye of the Needle" when I was fairly young, and found it a rousing good read. Not surprising considering it featured a lot of violence, Nazi spies, WWII intrigue and a fair amount of sex -- all catnip to a young reader.

The 1981 film version contains all of that stuff, but manages to be dull and lifeless. It's the story of a German spy with a secret that holds the fate of the entire war in the balance -- have you noticed that every war movie has this? -- who ends up seducing a lonely British housewife on an isolated island.

Donald Sutherland, one of the finest modern actors never to be nominated for an Oscar, is charming and icy as Henry Faber, a seemingly pleasant everyman working as a clerk at a shipyard. Of course, he's secretly transmitting all the troop movements to his German command in preparation for the Allied invasion of France. As we've heard before in a hundred other war pictures, great pains were taken to convince the Axis the invasion would happen further to the north instead of at Normandy.

Faber discovers the huge armada of American airplanes are actually fakes made out of wood and canvas, takes pictures of the lot, and prepares to bring this crucial information back to the Fatherland so he can personally deliver it to Hitler. He had been transmitting his intelligence via radio, but that was compromised early in the movie (requiring the murder of Faber's landlady).

This little plot point provides crucial late in the game, when Faber is trapped on remote Storm Island waiting to be picked up by a U-boat, and he has to find a way to radio the submarine to coordinate his pickup. Of course, he could always have spoken a few words into the transmitter and his mission would've been accomplished. But then, as they say, we wouldn't have a movie.

Kate Nelligan is sympathetic as Lucy, the woman who takes Faber into her bed seemingly four minutes after she's met him. She's more or less been abandoned by her husband, David (Christopher Cazenove), who lost his legs in a car accident on the day of their wedding. (Cazenove is an able-bodied actor, and the various half-hearted attempts to depict him otherwise leave it  unclear whether the character is supposed to wear prosthetics or not.) Now he lives out his days as a sheep farmer on the island, rejecting any physical affection from his wife and virtually ignoring their young tow-headed son, burying his sorrows in drink.

Lucy and Faber begin their affair almost immediately, the first day after Faber shipwrecks his stolen trawler on the shores during a storm. By the time of their last coupling, though, Lucy knows that her lover has killed her husband, resulting in a disturbing scene that implies the sex is coerced out of fear for her life and her child's.

The most interesting thing about Faber of course is his code name, The Needle, and why it's given: his penchant for dispatching his foes with a stiletto knife.

My recollection of the book is the stiletto is a narrow-bladed dagger with a hilt, which the Needle uses to thrust into his victims so they die without very much messy blood loss. I seem to recall he favored stabbing in the neck upward, so as to pierce the brain, resulting in instantaneous death.

In the movie, though, Faber uses a huge modified switchblade -- since that's what American audiences think of when they hear the word "stiletto." And he invariably stabs them in the gut, on the left side approximately where the stomach should be. Blood spurts out in a crimson river, and his victims invariably fall dead within seconds -- in contradiction of biology and basic common sense. The extension of the knife's blade is always accompanied by a harsh metallic "skree" sound, perhaps a forbear to the "snikt" of Wolverine's claws.

The biggest problem with "The Eye of the Needle" is that it's essentially two different movies smushed together. The first half is about Faber's flight from British authorities, led by a resolute but one-dimensional Ian Bannen. This includes a tense sequence aboard a train, where Faber is recognized by a soldier he used to be friendly with when he was a boy. Needless to say, he gets the needle.

Then the syrupy romance part takes over in the second half, leading up to a confrontation between Lucy and her would-be lover. Their combat is quite messy -- including cutting off some of his fingers with an axe -- yet Faber remains hesitant to use the full extent of his prowess. This begs the question of whether the spy truly feels something for the Englishwoman, or if she's simply a means to an end.

Given the confused logistics of the finale, "Eye of the Needle" is a movie that leaves us with more questions than answers, and even the questions aren't all that interesting.

Director Richard Marquand would go on to direct "Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi," an odd choice given his meager film credits, including this one. He later made "Jagged Edge" and "Hearts of Fire," Bob Dylan's brief foray into film acting, before dying young at age 49.

Reeling Backward: "Conan the Destroyer" (1984)

A war was fought long ago between "high" and "low" fantasy, and it's an easy guess which one was laid low. Much of early fantasy writing and movies was of the "pulp" or low variety, while most everything we've seen over the last half-century -- from "The Lord of the Rings" to "Game of Thrones" -- is high fantasy.

Simply put, high fantasy involves macro events, while low fantasy is about micro events. High fantasy is kings and queens, nobility and great heroes, undertaking tasks of world-changing import. Low fantasy is more akin to role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, where everyday adventurers seek glory and power for their own sake.

Robert E. Howard's Conan books were the definition of pulp fiction, published mostly in low-rent magazines or cheap paperbacks. His protagonist was a brawling barbarian who used his sword and brawn to seek treasure and fame. Eventually he would claim his own kingdom and trod somewhat into high fantasy territory -- something each of the three movie versions of Conan have noted as a bookend.

"Conan the Destroyer" was the ill-conceived follow-up to the highly successful "Conan the Barbarian," Arnold Schwarzenegger's breakout role. (The horrible 2011 remake starring Jason Momoa does not fit into the same continuum.) Both of the first movies depict Conan as essentially a self-serving mercenary, who only gets sucked into cataclysmic events through happenstance.

I like the idea of "Destroyer" more than the movie they actually made. It plays out like a deliberately more family-friendly version of the author's mythos -- Conan Lite. Howard's barbarian was unrepentantly bloodthirsty and lustful, something the first film did a decent job of depicting.

For some reason, the De Laurentiis family of producers decided the first movie was too violent, and wanted a milder version in hopes they could sell more tickets to teenagers. The script contained more comedy and less sex and fighting than "Barbarian," but when even that received an R rating from the MPAA, the movie was recut to get a PG -- barely sneaking in just a few days before the new PG-13 rating went into effect.

The stunt casting of non-actors Wilt Chamberlain (ex-NBA player) and Grace Jones (singer/model) pays some dividends, though it's easy to see why Jones' Hollywood career would continue a little further while Wilt's did not. The Stilt was as wooden as his nickname.

The physical contrast between the bodies of athletes Chamberlain and Schwarzenegger is pretty startling onscreen. Chamberlain, at 7-foot-1 and 275 pounds, was considered an overpowering behemoth during his playing days. But in a couple of shirtless scenes the NBA legend, who was then nearly 50, looks positively spindly next to the bodybuilder (who has admitted to being augmented by steroids).

Director Richard Fleischer does yeoman's work, and most of the fight scenes have a kinetic propulsion to them -- though he clearly does not have a taste for the testosterone-steeped material like John Milius did.

The setup is that Conan gets recruited by evil queen Tamaris (Sarah Douglas) to retrieve a magic horn so they can revive the stony form of their sleeping god, Dagoth. Her niece Jehnna (Olivia d'Abo), a pure virgin, is sent along as the only one who can touch the horn. Captain of the Guard Bombaata (Chamberlain) is dispatched to protect Jehnna from attackers, and from being deflowered by Conan.

(Given this and the skimpy outfits the princess wears, it's a little disconcerting when you consider that d'Abo was only 14 when the film was made.)

Along the way Conan recruits some companions, both old and new. Malak, a wise-cracking cowardly thief played by Tracey Walter, was his partner in various robberies and becomes his reluctant tag-along. I remember him clearly for his spiky hairdo, sheepish speech and favorite attack method of plunging two daggers into the kidneys of his victims from behind -- perhaps the only cinematic depiction of the classic RPG trope, the backstab.

Mako returns from the first movie as Conan's pet wizard/chronicler Akiro, whom Conan rescues from some cannibals who want to make a feast of him. Notably, sorcery in this world consists mostly of a bunch of deep-throated mutterings and telekinetic tricks -- opening doors and lighting torches, etc. Fireballs and lightning bolts? Fuhgeddaboudit.

And there's Zula, the frantic she-barbarian played by Jones -- wearing one of those ass-baring leather outfits with a cheeky cleft-concealing tail, which seemed to be popular in cinematic depictions of crazed marauders during this period (see Wez from "The Road Warrior"). She gets rescued by Conan and becomes his acolyte, wielding her wooden staff to great effect. Apparently, Jones was so enthusiastic in depicting Zula's raging fighting style that she seriously injured some stuntmen during production.

The story plays out as essentially one long chase scene -- first to retrieve a jewel from a wizard in an ice castle in the middle of a lake, then to another catacomb so they can use the jewel to open a dragon statue's mouth to find the horn. The horn is guarded by yet another wizard, who in a bit of casting sloppiness bears a great deal of resemblance to the queen's grand vizier, which leads you to believe they're one in the same.

One quibble -- other than the fact that the only thing wizards seem to do in this movie is hang around places guarding magical items -- is that the lake sorcerer is named Thoth-Amon. Although most of Stanley Mann's screenplay was his own concoction based on Howard's myriad writings, that moniker explicitly belongs to Conan's greatest nemesis, with whom he has an ongoing conflict through several of the later books.

Having him used as a quickie one-off opponent whom Conan quickly kills feels cheap and hasty. Imagine Professor Moriarty being just one of a number of thugs Sherlock Holmes dispatches in the course of a single case.

Schwarzenegger is once again terrific in the role of Conan, physically embodying the brute while giving him a stoic sort of grace. After a brief foray with "Red Sonja," he would leave behind the sword-and-sorcery genre in favor of guns and androids. Hollywood tried for years to put together another Conan movie for him, but his entry into politics effectively ended that, leading to the Momoa debacle.

I've said to anyone who will listen that I would love to see Schwarzenegger in another Conan flick. You might think his age (66) is an impediment, but Howard's books actually took the character out to age 70 -- and left his ultimate demise a mystery. With his term in the California governor's mansion ended, word has circulated that a new production is in the works, to be titled "Conan the Conqueror."

Hopefully if this does get made, they'll go back to the blood-soaked low fantasy roots of the original film and avoid the toned-down limpness of "Conan the Destroyer."