Contemporary reviews of the director’s sordid tale of a young psychotic cameraman who films his female victims as he kills them are full of terms like “nauseating” and “beastly”. One reviewer even famously suggested that the only way to dispose of it was “to shovel it up and flush it down the nearest sewer”. Glowing is hardly the word.
Most critics it seems were unable to equate the man who, as one half of ‘the Archers’ team with his writer partner Emeric Pressburger, had delivered British classics like The Red Shoes and A Matter Of Life And Death with seedy, low rent exploitation product like this.
The formerly esteemed director’s reputation never really recovered, retreating from the criticism to Australia where his career petered out pitifully in the following years.
Rewatching Peeping Tom today, thanks to a beautiful new extras-packed 4K Blu-ray release on Studio Canal, is an interesting experience. Despite the passing decades the story still exerts a real power to shock and surprise and while it does feel a million miles away from the director’s previous work in terms of approach and delivery it remains a powerful and disturbing masterpiece of the macabre all the same.
German actor Carl Boehm plays Mark Lewis, a young, good looking focus puller at a London film studio who is obsessed with capturing real life fear on film.
He does this by making his own ‘snuff’ movies where he murders models and prostitutes and makes them witness their own death via a mirror he attaches to his camera tripod.
Simultaneously he maintains a ‘normal’ relationship with Helen, a shy young woman (played by Anna Massey) who lives downstairs in his apartment block with her elderly blind mother.
As the murders around Soho continue Helen starts to fall for Mark but her mother grows increasingly convinced that there’s a dark side to the young man’s persona that’s putting her daughter in serious danger.
- Cult Movies: Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street still a cut above standard stalk-and-slash teen horror flicksOpens in new window
- Cult Movie: The Last Warning a final offering from Paul Leni, a man who pushed the boundaries of filmOpens in new window
- Cult Movies: Silent-era chiller The Cat and The Canary is a groundbreaking slice of Hollywood hokumOpens in new window
Powell films this grim psychological thriller beautifully and Boehm is truly remarkable as the almost pitiful lead.
Written by Second World War codebreaker Leo Marks and boasting a rich and garish palate of colours from cameraman Otto Heller, this movie delivers an undeniably sleazy picture of London’s burgeoning late 50s porn scene with a lurid, voyeuristic vibe hanging heavy over every scene.
It’s damning to admit but cinema is an essentially voyeuristic pastime - we sit silently in the dark watching other people’s lives after all - and Peeping Tom explores that illicit thrill like few other films before or since.
The fact that Powell attempts to explain his lead character’s unhealthy obsession with filming fear by including flashbacks to Mark’s troubled youth where he is tormented by his psychologist father (played rather disturbingly by Powell himself) only adds to the unsettling atmosphere on screen.
Released months before Hitchcock’s similarly uncomfortable Psycho, this is a film that was tragically misunderstood at the time but one that can now be viewed as a genuine cinematic masterpiece, albeit a deeply disturbing one.
