Peeping Tom caused a media frenzy for all the wrong reasons when it premiered in London in April, 1960.
As an examination of homicidal psychosis, director Michael Powell’s film was unlike anything the establishment had seen before. Labelled vile, sick and demented by the mainstream press, the film was removed from cinemas after only a few days in release. The reputation surrounding Powell’s thriller ensured underground screenings and bootleg prints were a hot item throughout the 1960s and 70s.
Peeping Tom tells the story of Mark Lewis (played with a wide-eyed malevolence by cherub-faced German actor Carl Boehm), abused as a child in the name of his father’s scientific endeavours and now a sullen loner, he lives in a darkroom, obsessed with the secret images he captures on his collection of moving-picture cameras. Most disturbing is his latest creative outlet – capturing the moment of death as he murders young women, providing for his victims a camera-mounted mirror so that they may also experience the instant of their demise.
It is a brilliant conceit on the part of Powell and his screenwriter, Leo Marks. It creates a first-person perspective for the audience, trapping them with and within the actions of the killer, asking them to confront his deeds as if committing them themselves. In one sequence that defines stomach-twisting suspense, Lewis plans the murder of Moira Shearer as she dances merrily around a closed-down film-set, unaware of the fate to befall her, the ironic thrill her musical-inspired moves are providing her deranged companion, or the foreboding sense of inescapability that is enveloping the audience.
Dripping in lush, Eastman-Color reds and pools of azure blues, every bit as exaggerated and staged as the world seen through his killers eyes, Michael Powell has created a cinematic love letter – extolling the power of the image in every frame – but wrapping it in one of the most disturbing portraits of dissociative horror ever filmed. This one film all but cost him his career – the director of the classic films The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter Of Life And Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948) and The Battle Of River Plate (1956) became an outcast in the very industry he kept alive during the war years. It was the Australian film industry that threw him a lifeline in 1966 and he did not let his colonial friends down – he directed They’re A Weird Mob, which has become a landmark local production and one of the most-loved Aussie films ever.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho began its U.K. run in August of 1960, five months after Peeping Tom had been banished. Though just as shocking, Psycho is a pop-psychology, drive-in theatre version of the madness explored in Powell’s masterpiece. A re-release of the fully-restored Peeping Tom (as it appears on this Special Edition DVD) was presented by Martin Scorsese in 2002; the documentary Eye Of The Beholder, included in the DVD’s extras, examines the legacy and impact of the film and features Scorsese, Powell’s widow, Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker, lead actor Boehm, Powell’s son Columba Powell (who appears in the film as the young Lewis) and several film scholars, all of whom agree Peeping Tom is one of the most accomplished and important films ever made
