10 Most Sympathetic Movie Kidnappers And Hostage Takers

5. Freddie Clegg - The Collector (1965)

If ever there was a curio from the onset of the swinging sixties, and two performers whose brief stardom evoked that era€™s flash in the pan, it was the film of John Fowles€™ The Collector and its two leads, Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar. It was also an unlikely literary property to be adapted by William Wyler, Oscar-winning Hollywood director of Ben-Hur, but the old hand had such faith in it that he turned down The Sound Of Music for the gig. Most tellingly, Wyler also played psychological games with his actors that ratcheted up the claustrophobia onscreen. He€™d learned that Stamp and Eggar had been at drama school together, and that the desirable Samantha had turned Terry Stamp down. It seemed the perfect background for the role of Clegg, the repressed clerk who, after a big win on the football pools (sixties counterpart of the National Lottery), buys himself a lonely house just outside London. An introverted collector of dead butterflies, he also goes looking for a love object to share his existence with him. It€™s the poignant hopelessness of Freddie Clegg€™s desires that makes The Collector play well today, when so much from the same era seems painfully dated. Matching Fowles€™ pessimistic tone, the film is an essay in alienation between one person too awkward to communicate and another who regards herself as his social superior. For Miranda, who has been chloroformed and kidnapped by Clegg, is everything that he is not: educated; self-confident; assured of her place in what she sees as the coming egalitarian society (though she could never regard her captor as an equal). And for all that, he keeps her prisoner in the forlorn hope that she€™ll fall in love with him. In keeping with the theme of locked-down angst, Clegg doesn€™t give way to rapacious instincts as in No Orchids For Miss Blandish. In fact, when Miranda calculates that her best hope of escape lies in showing him physical affection, he recoils and insists, "I€™ve lost all respect for you!" The cat-and-mouse games take on a more conventional thriller form, but director Wyler, a seasoned adapter of literary works, resisted the urging of producers to opt for an upbeat ending. Instead, as in Fowles, Clegg inadvertently allows Miranda to die when he leaves untreated the pneumonia that he€™s caused. The film closes on a voiceover from Freddie which rationalises all the disastrous choices he€™s made. Sitting in his car, instead of feeling contrition he resolves to do it better this time, stalking a young woman not so far removed from his social position and class. It€™s a chilling ending to a story featuring little actual violence or sexual contact, suggesting, as in the book, that unexplained disappearances may be due to the Freddie Cleggs of this world. In a terrible coda, despite the absence of any pornographic content, The Collector inspired sadistic fantasies in a sick mind. In the 1980s, ex-US Marine and survivalist Leonard Lake put into action his Operation Miranda - named after Clegg€™s hapless captive. He reduced captured young women (whose families he and his accomplice murdered) to the level of abused sex slaves, before killing them. The case itself inspired a 2012 US exploitation movie, House On The Hill, but this writer will pass on that till a much later date. For while Lake killed himself on arrest, his accomplice, Hong Kong-born Charles Ng, faced a trial in the late 1990s that featured videotapes of his victims, which I covered for Channel 5 doc Journey Into Evil. The occasional nightmares it inspired outlasted the trial, but that, as they say, is another story...