Peeping Tom – Criterion Collection
Amazon.co.uk Review
Michael Powell lays bare the cinema’s dark voyeuristic underside in this disturbing 1960 psychodrama thriller. Handsome young Carl Boehm is Mark Lewis, a shy, socially clumsy young man shaped by the psychic scars of an emotionally abusive parent, in this case a psychologist father (the director in a perverse cameo) who subjected his son to nightmarish experiments in fear and recorded every interaction with a movie camera. Now Mark continues his father’s work, sadistically killing young women with a phallic-like blade attached to his movie camera and filming their final, terrified moments for his definitive documentary on fear. Set in contemporary London, which Powell evokes in a lush, colourful seediness, this film presents Mark as much victim as villain and implicates the audience in his scopophilic activities as we become the spectators to his snuff film screenings. Comparisons to Hitchcock’s Psycho, released the same year, are inevitable. Powell’s film was reviled upon release, and it practically destroyed his career, ironic in light of the acclaim and success that greeted Psycho, but Powell’s picture hit a little too close to home with its urban setting, full colour photography, documentary techniques and especially its uneasy connections between sex, violence and the cinema. We can thank Martin Scorsese for sponsoring its 1979 re-release, which presented the complete, uncut version to appreciative audiences for the first time. This powerfully perverse film was years ahead of its time and remains one of the most disturbing and psychologically complex horror films ever made. –Sean Axmaker, Amazon.com
This Criterion Collection edition of Peeping Tom is perfect quality, and the film is shocking even by today’s standards. The subtext of how film and pornography is actually made works well, as we get to know a solitary male who secretly films women. He also kills them. I disagree with other reviewers here who suggest that there is something disturbed about the creative team behind the product. Was Shakespeare disturbed when he created Macbeth?
The appalling truth which this movie seeks to engage with is that there are disgusting element in everyone’s sexuality. We all treat others as objects and behave like dolls, whether it is in our response to sexually styled advertising when we buy things, or in our own relationships. The film disturbs us because it reveals a spectrum of questionable sexual behaviour with the main character at an extreme of voyeurism and murder.
The curious mix of guilt and innocence in the central performance are what make the film so effective. There is nothing else like it and it does conjur up the seedy world of the 1960s, before pornography became something that intruded into daily internet experience and perfume advertising.
Rating: 5 / 5
I enjoyed the modesty of this film, and the complexity of the portrayal of the human mind. The film debated what drives someone to go to the cinema to watch murder, sex and violence? A very brave film for its time, it threw back questions that the audience weren’t ready to be answered. Definately a head of its time, caused much contraversy (according to my film lecturer)! A must see if you prefer a film, which will make you think, rather than bombard you with gore!
Rating: 3 / 5
Truly ahead of its time, Michael Powell excelled himself and the minds of his audience with this extraodinary piece of work.
I remember first seeing this as a naive 12 year old late one night on BBC2 and it was the first film that truly moved me in a unexplainable way.
As you expect from Powell the use of colour is stunning, coupled with a difficult storyline. The film was panned on release and only due to the likes of Martin Scorsese has it become the classic that it always was.
Simply stunning, and easily ranks among Powell’s best work. Buy it !
Rating: 5 / 5
“Peeping Tom” is a film whose place in cinematic history cannot help but outweigh the critical value of the film itself. When it was released in Great Britain in 1960 it was universally condemned by the critics and pulled from released the first week, effectively ending the career of director Michael Powell (“I Know Where I’m Going,” “Black Narcissus,” “The Red Shoes”). “Peeping Tom” is about a young man who not only murders women, but who films them as he kills them. What upset the critics was that Powell used the perspective of the camera to turn the viewing audience into voyeurs as well, and that he made the murderer into a sympathetic figure.
Reducing “Peeping Tom” to the level of a slasher film misses the point, because this is much more of a psychological portrait of a troubled young man. Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) works as an assistant cameraman at a film studio and has trouble appreciating the difference between the real world and what he sees through the lens of a camera. Mark has another job, taking “views” of half naked women for the owner of the local news agent shope (Bartlett Mullins) to sell discretely to his customers. But Mark’s voyeurism is ultimately not about sex, but rather about fear: provoking it and recording it. As Mark slowly opens up to Helen (Anna Massey), the girl who lives downstairs in his building who shows an interest in his work, we learn that his father was a psychologist who filmed his son in a series of disquieting experiments into the nature of fear. The boy is following in daddy’s footsteps. Powell and screenwriter Leo Marks had wanted to do a film about the work of Sigmund Freud, but John Huston was working on “Freud” in Hollywood, so Marks suggest a story about a voyeuristic murderer as an alternative psychological thriller. Ultimately, the psychological dimensions of “Peeping Tom” outweigh the thriller elements and are what make this a noteworthy film.
“Peeping Tom” came out before “Psycho,” and the comparisons are inevitable, although they seem as much the work of different times as of different directors. Part of it is that Powell is working in technicolor, with rich colors which work against the horror elements in the film. But we also have to take into account that Powell is not dealing with suspense as a key part of the equation and that there is nothing in “Peeping Tom” anywhere near the level of the shower scene in “Psycho.” The key scene is the opening sequences, where we see Mark approach a prostitute on the street, his camera becomes the point of view for the audience, and we see the terror on this face of his first victim before she dies. Then, during the opening credits, we see Mark watching the film he has just shot. The film’s opening sets up the rules for the game in this film and no doubt outraged the London film credits before the director’s name appeared (shown over Mark’s projector no less). Add to this the fact that Powell and his son played Mark’s father and Mark as a child, and that probably outraged them more than the half naked women lounging around in display positions. Powell’s leading man was the son of a noted Austrian conductor and Boehm’s slight German accent probably afforded the critics the small confort that this twisted individual was not a proper English lad.
Since this is a Criterion Collection DVD the presentation of the film is done right, with a commentary track by film theorist Laura Mulvey who combines criticism of the film with the history of the film, cast, and crew. Serious film students will enjoy her insights and her comprehensive critique of the film as a true commentary on “Peeping Tom,” and not the gay banter of actors and crew trying to come up with things to say that are so disappointing on so many commentary tracks. There is a theatrical trailer, whose tenor seems quite at odds with the film itself, a gallery of production stills, and a Channel 4 U.K. documentary “A Very British Psycho,” which relates the controversy of the film and interviews screenwriter Leo Marks and the critics who bashed the film on its release in 1962. You cannot help but feel that while it was Michael Powell’s directing career that was ended up this film, it was Marks who should have suffered more as the writer is at least as disturbing a personality as his fictional creation in the film.
Rating: 5 / 5
I will be honest now. I am a gorehound, and I love films with a notorious background. Don’t know what that says about my mental state, but who cares. That’s my taste, and it wont change.
I came to watch PEEPING TOM for the very reasons stated above. It had a notorious background and the subject matter seemed to suggest a gore-filled film. I found out however that this was not the case. There is no gore whatsoever, and on first viewing the film (to me) seemed very tame by today’s standards. But then you watch it again, looking at it more deeply, and you begin to think about the themes that are noe becoming more and more evident. And then you realise that this is indeed a shocking film, especially for its time.
The storyline is given in the Amazon summary so I won go into all that. I will say that to me this film came across as a psychological study into a corrupt and perverted mind, a mental state brought on by the years of abuse (but not being seen that way by the main character) resulting from the study of fear. And that’s what makes the film interesting and thought-provoking.
The director’s reputation was undeservedly destroyed after the release of this film, and it’s a pity, as Michael Powell’s vision is a shocking but valid study of the injured human mind.
Gorehounds beware, there is none to be found here. But this is indeed a powerful film that should be watched by fans of the genre.
Rating: 4 / 5