The New Men as Non-Men

...Miranda, who stands more for the natural and unspoiled than for any social order, attempts to save Clegg, pity for whom overcomes her loathing...

...She is 20, a gifted upper-middle-class art student...

...It turns the girl into someone at times much too defensive, and thus, by implication, rather too guilty...

...This aristocratic point of view is compellingly conveyed by the book, and generally ignored in the movie version...

...Frederick Clegg abducts his princesse lointaine, pampers her, does not assault her physically, and madly assumes that by keeping her long enough he can make her love him...

...Could it be that the director, William Wyler, was eager not to offend an audience who liked his Ben Hur and The Best Years of Our Lives, and who, no doubt, also like plaster ducks...

...To this tepid lepidopterologist it is incomprehensible why his golden butterfly should not thrive in a nicely padded captivity in which everything is available except light, air, movement, and communion with the world...

...Yet all you put in their place is a horrid little refusal to have nasty thoughts or do nasty things Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty...

...Miranda has to smash some awful plaster ducks with which his fine 1623 house is decorated...

...Does Wyler himself have a taste for them...

...In the novel, John Fowles has attempted something ambitious...

...though he may obligingly agree, understands none of it...

...He also introduces (unlike the movie), through entries in Miranda's diary, her growing awareness that she really loves G. P., a middle- aged, untidy sensualist and brilliant painter—a Gulley Jimsonish character whom Fowles does not quite bring off...

...Arrived though they are, the New People represent "the new form of poverty...

...Consider some typical changes...

...All this is missing from the film, whose aim is to make Clegg, except for his initial and final aberration, as likable as possible...

...Of course, society is to blame, but as Fowles demonstrates, the Cleggs, or Calibans, of this world are only too eager to meet oppression with a combination of servility, conformity, and mistrust of any generous stirrings, which makes them at least half responsible themselves...

...I could multiply such examples, but I do not want to minimize the achievements of the movie...

...Maurice Jarre's score is the most musically and psychologically satisfying work this intelligent artist has turned out since Sundays and Cybele: I particularly liked the chamber-music quality throughout, and the dramatic effects achieved by bold changes in instrumentation from harpsichord to electronics...

...How is one to rate a film thoroughly successful on a lower level, based on a novel that is flawed, but more ambitious, more meaningful, more in the realm of serious art...

...she cannot begin to make him understand about painting and literature...

...By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth...

...Something more than plaster ducks has been ducked...

...it makes Clegg not only pathetic, which he is in the book, but also sympathetic—even his impotence is fudged over...

...The book, furthermore, operates on several levels...

...The others hadn't any money and these haven't any soul...

...But Fowles was after more than sound, sensible dramaturgy: He was evoking the horror of Clegg in the coolest, most commonsensical way —making him not likable but understandable and typical, and thus genuinely frightening...

...Anyhow, Miranda matures in her prison, and her death becomes not only tragic but also ironic: a terrible joke...

...He buys a country house complete with hidden cellar and equips the latter as a comfortable prison for his prize butterfly, the beautiful Miranda Grey...

...Clegg is the kind of bloodless nonentity the English Non-Conformist lower middle-classes are all too apt to produce—no matter what heroic archetypes John Osborne or Albert Finney may proffer...

...Again, one of the most chilling elements in the book is Clegg's amateur photography...

...In vain, for Clegg is one of those New Men who are coming into money and power in England and elsewhere, and whose ignorance, impotence, and clammy mistrust of the free play of the mind is more hostile to Miranda's gracious enlightenment than any overt violence could be...

...Besides the psychological suspense story, there is also the myth of radiant aliveness exposed to repressed subhumanity...

...It is these pictures that he really enjoys, and, on one level, the book is a contest between painting (art, life, Miranda) and photography (non-art, death, Clegg...

...he has always adored her from a distance without daring to speak to her...

...But Clegg...

...Evil, in any case, is allowed to prosper in the end, a step toward maturity in American movie-making that cannot be loudly enough hailed...

...But it makes important changes...

...In the book, much is made of Clegg's garish taste in furniture, clothes, art...

...Most impressive, however, is the acting...

...his sense of beauty extends only to dead butterflies and Miranda's outward appearance, and his sense of duty has killed nearly every healthy impulse in him, to the point of rendering him physically and spiritually impotent...

...Down to the last wrinkling and unwrinkling of the forehead, to the inchoate little sounds over Miranda's dead body, this is performing of the highest, most illuminating order...

...From the point of view of sound dramatic conflict, this is, of course, sensible...

...Wyler has added little directorial touches that are often quite beautiful, such as the trembling of dead butterflies in their cases when Miranda, in living indignation, slams the door of the collection room...

...it eliminates tellingly dreary details that evoke the Clegg world in all its grubbiness and sterility...

...The photography, too, is admirably workmanlike...

...For Wyler has made, even so, an adult and provocative film, which, if one did not know the compromises it makes with the novel, would seem uncompromising...

...For those who have read it beforehand, I cannot say, not being of their number...

...As Clegg, Terence Stamp conveys the most complex shadings of a socially and sexually disturbed psyche with perspicuity but not obviousness...

...and, most important, it does not connect Clegg's psychic aberrancy with his social background: It shies away from the central accusation, the basic allegory, the coming to power of the petty bourgeoisie as the death of the finer aspects of man...

...The hero of The Collector is a painfully ordinary young English bank clerk, distinguished only by his dour abstemiousness with women and passionate pursuit of the butterflies he collects...

...He is unable to enjoy Miranda physically, even when she offers herself to him out of genuine compassion as much as desire to escape, and justifies this by declaring her a slut...

...Then he wins a fortune in the football pools, and an extraordinary idea begins to obsess and possess him...

...Samantha Eggar's Miranda is almost as persuasive, and Miss Eggar has a wonderfully shrewd kind of loveliness, too, which seems to know when to be mere healthy Vassargirlishness, and when to ascend into absolute beauty...

...What does work very well in the book is the social level...

...That leaves us with the great ultimate question...

...You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbish voices and ways,' Miranda tells her jailer in a speech significantly miss-ing from the film...

...He grieves for a while, then the class resentment for his "la-dida" victim gains a posthumous upper hand, and he sets out to kidnap a more amenable working-class butterfly, one whom he'll be able to "teach...

...Their duel, as she fights for her freedom and he for her love, ends after a couple of months in her death...

...No wonder Miranda comes to resent the self-righteous respect with which Clegg treats her, the humbly unpresuming demands he makes on her, his spidery concern...

...she can't bear to put on the dresses he buys for her...

...He tells the story (as the movie does not) from two points of view, Clegg's and Miranda's, and achieves notable results with the psychological and linguistic evocation of contrasting behavior, psyches and diction...

...I think Wyler is to be praised for good film-making, and reprehended for imperfect integrity...

...In the film, the furniture and clothes are just slightly off (clever work by the art director, John Stoll)—no plaster ducks!—and Clegg's arguments against The Catcher in the Rye and a Picasso reproduction emerge rather too convincing...

...The screenplay by Stanley Mann and John Kohn, within the strictures strictures already noted, deftly telescopes the novel and creates cinematic effects that are both economical and equivalent to the verbal ones of the book—thus the single flashback tells remarkably much with great terseness...

...The film is a very skillful, even artful, tale of a deranged man's weird action, and it does contain also some of the social facts: resentment, defensiveness, inability of the classes to communicate...

...Since Clegg prefers to call himself Ferdinand, but Miranda is compelled to think of him as Caliban, variations on The Tempest establish a poetico-mythical frame of reference that, 1 must admit, does not quite succeed...

...He then proceeds to take semi-nude pictures of her under chloroform, and later, when she is already deathly ill, he binds and gags her and takes pictures in the nude...

...For those who read it afterward, as I did, it raises some interesting but troubling questions...

...the preponderance of blues and greens, though, I suspect, unintentional, may actually enhance the mood of the story...