Terence Stamp is equal parts beautiful and creepy as the stalker who locks the object of his affection away in his cellar in the hopes that she will fall in love with him. Great stuff.
A BIG thank you to Richard for making me aware of this one! I loved it. I wasn't expecting much more than a slice of '60s horror exploitation, which I'd have been happy with, but this was much more substantial than that.
Interesting that it was made in 1965, the same year as
The Ipcress File. The few glimpses of '60s London we get here -- pretty, leafy Hampstead -- are a bit swingier than the rainy, overcast Whitehall of
Ipcress, but there is one scene set in Trafalgar Square. It's funny to think of Terence Stamp’s real-life flatmate at the time, Harry Palmer, shuffling papers just up the road while Stamp drives past with the original Maggie Gioberti in the boot of his car.
Like Karen Mackenzie, Samantha Eggar wakes to find herself locked in a cellar with a wardrobe full of clothes in her size -- only her captor isn't a shlub like Phil Harbert, but the Adonis-like Stamp. Casting him as a meek little weirdo seems very strange at first, but it kind of contributes to the off-kilter oddness of the whole film. And his performance is so brilliantly awkward and tortured that after a while you just buy it. (Oh and there's also a bathroom scene that is reminiscent of Krystle and Joel Abrigore's on DYNASTY, whilst being somehow both kinkier and more chaste.)
Stamp's character is like an English working class Norman Bates, a sexually repressed man-child who surrounds himself with dead butterflies rather than stuffed birds. Like Janet Leigh in
Psycho, the target of his obsession is a liberated young "woman of today", whom he feels threatened by as well as attracted to. There's also an element of 1967's
Bonnie and Clyde to their dynamic: Warren Beatty's impotent Clyde to Faye Dunaway's more worldly Bonnie.
In part, Stamp seems to represent the confusion and resentment of those who felt excluded from the '60s social and sexual revolution. His angry rant about not being able to understand Picasso or
Catcher in the Rye is brilliant and weirdly moving.
And the print (or digital equivalent thereof) on Netflix is tip-top. The colours really pop!