Peeping Tom

Horrorphile

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Peeping Tom

January 28th 2010 03:12

Released the same year as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Peeping Tom, directed by Michael Powell, was also a movie years ahead of its time, a psychological thriller that operates with the dark machinations and severity of a horror. Powell had garnered enormous critical acclaim for numerous films he made with Emeric Pressburger in the 40s and 50s, but he went alone on Peeping Tom, and it proved to be the kiss of death, effectively ending his career in England. He made several other features before his death in 1990, but none came close to capturing the disturbing slow-burn subversive power of Peeping Tom.

Carl Boehm as Mark Lewis

Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) is a strange, lonely, sexually-repressed man working as a focus-puller for a British film studio. He moonlights shooting “cheesecake” pics in his mezzanine apartment for the seedy newsagent on street level below, whilst harbouring his own directorial desires; a documentary on the expression of extreme human fear. It is this unhealthy obsession with the elusiveness of mortality and his intent on capturing it on film that has lead Lewis to become a murderer.

Anna Massey as Helen

Maxine Audley as Helen's mother

His twisted state of mind, kept in check (just) by the mundane routine of his day job, and the amorous curiosity of his apartment building neighbour, Helen (Anna Massey), who lives with her suspicious blind mother (Maxine Audley), dates back to the psychological testing of his scientist father when Lewis was just a boy serving as his father’s subject for cold-blooded experiments in terror. Of course, now as a grown man, Lewis is a chip off the old block … but he’s fallen much further. Lewis is a determined documenteur, recording women’s contorted features and dying gasps on his portable 16mm camera after he stabs them with the blade concealed in his tripod. But like all obsessions, it will eventually consume him.

Mark sets up a shot of Dora (Brenda Bruce)

Shot in startlingly vivid technicolour and partially on soundstages Peeping Tom is garish and sumptuous in equal measures. A brilliant and utterly creepy performance from German actor Boehm (real name Karlheinz Böhm), who bore a striking similarity to a young Udo Kier (albeit Aryan blond). Anna Massey was excellent also; a rather mature 21-year-old I might add. Rounding off the solid support cast were Jack Watson as Chief Inspector Gregg, Moira Shearer as dancing model Vivian, and Shirley Anne Field, as the frustratingly inept movie starlet Diane Ashley.

Mark gets to the point with Vivian (Moira Shearer)

24 frames a second of fear

Compared to modern horror movies Peeping Tom is very tame in terms of what is shown, however the tone and suggestion of violence is just as powerful. Although not specifically sympathetic to the character of Mark Lewis, the movie does indulge him in his angst, his psychological turmoil, his insanity, suggesting he might have been capable of salvation (but in the reality of the movie he was too far gone). It was both clever and dangerous for Powell to have challenged his audience at the end of the puritanical, yet rebellious 50s. It had a double-edged sword: shooting over most people's heads, but also cutting a deep wound in the society's moral psyche.

WARNING! SPOILER ALERT!

Mark shows Helen his father's home movies

The movie was heavily cut by the BBFC censors before being released, and consequently some scenes still have a jagged feel to them. The murders of Vivian Moira Shearer) and Dora (Brenda Bruce), the two models, were toned down, shots of nudity were deleted (including photos of nude girls in Lewis’s album), and the killer's suicide was shortened, as were the scenes featuring the lethal spike. Although some of these cuts were restored in later video and DVD releases much of the edited footage is now considered lost forever. Even with the censors’ cuts, the moral ambiguity and reviled darkness inherent in the movie left the public outraged and the critics incensed. Powell had unwittingly sabotaged his own career, and left it in ruins (imagine if Spielberg decided to make a movie about pedophilia or bestiality …)

Life flashing before one's eyes

Yet ironically, Peeping Tom has aged extraordinarily well, even with those prim and prissy English accents of the time. Playing on the theme of scoptophilia (the morbid fear of being stared at) is just as fascinating now, and will perhaps become more so as society’s ever-increasing desire for access-all-areas, the allure of online voyeurism, and the burgeoning Big Brother reality of surveillance breaks down more and more our sacred walls of privacy. The blurring between reality and fiction, the merging of sensuality and the grotesque, has always been ripe for the cinematic plucking, Powell dipped his feet in the waters, was compelled by the lurid sensation to delve deeper, began to wade in further, only to be taken by the crocodiles.

Here's the hysterical original trailer:

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Posted By: Bryn - Category: movie reviews

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Comments

15 Comments. [ Add A Comment ]

Comment by Matt Shea

January 28th 2010 05:10

20/20 Filmsight

Holy crap, Bryn, what a blast from the past. I barely remember this but need to remind myself ASAP. Great write-up.

Comment by The Master

January 29th 2010 17:41

Thanks for letting us know, I need to add this one to my list of Horror flicks, I am assuming of course that the DVD version is un-censored?

Comment by Bryn

January 31st 2010 02:28

Horrorphile

Master,
Considering the movie was made in 1960, and was cut prior to release, the DVD hasn't been further censored. There's no nudity and virtually no blood, but was considered vile and reprehensible by most audiences and critics when it first came out.

Comment by The Master

February 1st 2010 16:44

You know it's always been my experience that when people are so outraged or angry about something, especially something like the Theme the Movie was exploring, it's usually because it touches a nerve somewhere, because maybe deep down inside those people who censored it were afraid that perhaps they would do something like that or perhaps something similar? who knows, or maybe they were just Victorian in mind.

-The Master

Comment by The Master

February 1st 2010 16:52

Comment by Bryn

February 2nd 2010 00:03

Horrorphile

Master, what touched a nerve in 1960 is quite different to what touches nerves now. One can argue audiences are rather desensitized these days ... I know I am.

Comment by The Master

February 3rd 2010 19:08

True,true, it's not the same as before where one movie gave the same reaction to almost everyone, now a days for something like that to happen it would take a pretty good (or bad) movie

Comment by Bryn

February 4th 2010 02:50

Horrorphile

There are some taboos still in mainstream cinema: bestiality being one, pedophilia being another ...

Comment by The Master

February 4th 2010 17:38

LOL!!!! in American movies perhaps, but on the Independent Film channel I saw part of one movie (From Spain) that showed a man who nearly molested a child,now of course he didn't manage to do it because the girl's mother called her and he got spooked and took off, but still it sickened me. God and then it showed the girl skinny dipping and that's when I changed the channel it was too disgusting for me. Then a friend of mine named Daniella told me that she and her family saw the intro to another movie (Also from Spain) where this guy was F*** a Pig in the beginning of it, I was wtf is wrong with Spain?!!!!

Comment by Bryn

February 4th 2010 21:42

Horrorphile

HAHAHA! You ain't seen nothin'!

Comment by The Master

February 9th 2010 18:05

Oh GOD are you actually saying there's more of still?

Comment by Bryn

February 9th 2010 21:34

Horrorphile

Let's just say there are some sick fucks out there making movies ... Much of it coursing through the underground.

Comment by The Master

February 10th 2010 19:07

Well I hope I never see more of that shit ever again

Comment by Bryn

February 10th 2010 22:11

Horrorphile

Unless you dig for it, you'll probably never get your hands dirty ...

Comment by The Master

February 13th 2010 19:13

Or until it comes out on Indepdent Film channel again lmao!!!

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