Peeping Tom
Michael Powell, UK, 1960, 106 mins
Review by Gerald Houghton (1994)
Until relatively recently anyone born after the fifties could be forgiven for not recognising the late Michael Powell as one of the key figures of British film. With his partner Emeric Pressburger, Powell created some of the most imaginative and exciting films ever to come out of this country - the almost proto-magic realism of A Canterbury Tale (1944), the powerfully erotic Black Narcissus (1946), and their masterpiece, the stirring angelic fantasy A Matter of Life and Death (1945). When The Archers' partnership dissolved, Powell went on to Leo Marks' multi-layered, prophetic serial killer script Peeping Tom, seemingly unaware of the extraordinary passions the film would evoke. The result was greeted with some of the most vitriolic reviews ever (Tribune: "The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer"), and the film closed in days. Not until the so-called movie-brats rehabilitated Powell as a film-making icon towards the end of his life was the film rediscovered and rightfully hailed as one of the masterworks of British cinema.
Of course, Powell's film was before its time. The shy Mark Lewis (Karl Bohm) works as a movie focus-puller, but his real purpose is a compulsion to kill, and film the terrified reactions of his victims to their own deaths. So far, so much exploitation picture, but the script makes clear that Mark is also a victim - in childhood home-movies we see him used and abused by his father (the two perversely played by Powell and his own son Columba) in a study of the pathology of fear.
Remarkable things abound, particularly Bohm (later of Fassbinder's Fox and His Friends), who manages to fashion from the lonely Mark a compelling mix of helplessness and movie monster extraordinaire. No matter how dark, how calculating his experimentation with a movie camera (witness the opening murder, the killing on a film set), the audience never loses a measure of sympathy, nor the possibility of redemption through the nice girl downstairs (a young Anna Massey). The whole is suffused with what Martin Scorsese called tabloid colour, a grotesque, lurid flush that all too acutely reflects its subject.
The film overflows with ideas and allusions to seeing. Massey's mother (Maxine Audley) is blind, and thus, no matter how vulnerable she appears, even alone with Mark in his studio, is his most un-natural victim in the whole film. Mark also takes girlie pictures above a seedy newsagent's shop, most strikingly (particularly for 1960) of a partially disfigured model. And his idea of a birthday gift for librarian and nascent author children's author Massey (she may as well have INNOCENT stamped on her forehead) is to show her his father's deviant, disturbing little films. (Just how much a film like Peeping Tom influenced the likes of the infamous video-camera killing in McNaughton's ferocious Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) is surely up for debate. Certainly they share a common-bond in their unflinching attitude and the extreme critical reaction they engendered.)
Coincidentally released in the same year as Psycho, the real tragedy of Powell's film was of course that he never recovered, working briefly in Australia, and ending his career with the Children's Film Foundation. What he might have achieved we shall never know, but 34 years on, this welcome reissue proves Peeping Tom one of the most exceptional films ever made in Britain.