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MPRS

looked to me..

PECTIN

obtained by swapping IN and PECT

and they came from taking S[ection] out of INSPECT

and whether or not that is right, it is plenty good enough for me

Ah, very good, tatters. I now see that Chambers has inspect as an obsolete noun form. I still don't know why the word "previous" is there. Still annoyed at the setter, but thank you much, tatters.

previous is the indicator for "obsolete"

Oh, of course. Makes more sense than "stale." Thanks once again, tatters.

How famous is this film? My knowledge of cinema in general is beyond feeble. I have words for 44 and 33, both of which could be negotiated, but googling them produces nothing obvious. The name of the hunter is elusive, not a Spanish person is it?

Anagram the puzzle title and it should give you a massive nudge

Indeed Planks, it was an excellent red herring. Perhaps a bit too good? The annoying thing is that it is all there in plain sight, so it’s my own fault that I wasted so much time 😡

I did prefer Elgin’s previous Listener, 4487, which was a masterpiece and much more AHA! than WTF?

CANDLESTICK

It's a very famous film featuring an adventurous archaeologist (7,5). I'm fairly sure of that because of the reference in the preamble to "jumping from letter to letter", which is something he does in the film after passing the 33Down as a "penitent man". After that he steps onto an optically disguised 44Ac as a "leap of faith".

My problem is that I'm struggling to spell out the letters of his name using the clashes that I have. So, I could be gulping down a massive red herring.

No red herring. Of your [7,5] clashes are at letters 3,4,7,9,10 and 11

I agree with CD that there may have been elements here that were either lost, or at least de-emphasised, in the editing.

(Spoiler alert)

The position of the clashes is non-arbitrary, but the puzzle can be solved as if they were. Using the part (a) of the preamble instructions along with the disambiguation of (b) gives the cinematic hunter; highlighting the quarry fulfils the requirements.

However, the unused letters give the path of a previous achiever, moving left to right, starting with a different top row lettered cell.

The 1930’s hunter follows the same path as his predecessor in reverse (with a couple of side-steps). I guess the difficulty in clashing the high-Scrabble scoring letter led to the device of the two four-barred cells.

It’s had way too much work put into it to be a Nina of course, and it may be missed on first run through (by me, for one).

Many thanks indeed Elgin.