There’s something wrong with Mark, (Boehm). He’s a lonely, unfriendly sort of chap. He has a lowly job at a film studio and makes extra money selling photographs to porn shops. But its his hobby that’s the real problem. He’s obsessed with how people register fear through facial expression and he films young women’s faces as he stabs them to death by a surprising method. We wonder how all this has come about – might he have had an unhappy childhood and do we sense the influence of a stern father figure?
Critics at the time loathed this film and their scathing reviews caused it to be pulled from cinemas. The reaction cast a shadow over the last years of Michael Powell’s great career (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp 1943, A Matter of Life and Death 1946, Black Narcissus 1947, The Red Shoes 1948, The Battle of the River Plate 1956). 1960 also saw the release of Psycho the black humour in Hitchcock’s film saved it from being similarly panned.
While critics saw only sensationalist sexual violence in Peeping Tom, Powell viewed the film as a masterpiece and his intent was to create a three-dimensional portrait of a killer, someone we could feel pity, even sympathy for, while at the same time examining the role of the audience as voyeur. Today we are inured to the output of Hollywood’s slasher-killer films and UK/USA TV detective stories where murderous violence against women is rife, so the outcry about Powell’s film as vile might seem puzzling.
Perhaps it was partly to do with an expectation of prettier offerings from this director. We are now also familiar with interest in surveillance and voyeurism in society and the theme has been at the heart of a number of films screened by WFC in past seasons including Red Road, Hidden, The Lives of Others and Frozen. Michael Powell it seems was ahead of his time and he led the way with an intelligent psychological thriller which questions why we watch in the dark just as Mark watches on screen.
Since the 1970s commentators with a revisionist attitude (including Martin Scorsese) champion the film and tell us the critics on release got it all wrong. Yet even today the film creates uneasiness about what were seeing that provokes polarised reactions from admiration to revulsion.
His film is a masterpiece precisely because it doesn’t let us off the hook, like all of those silly teenage slasher movies do. We cannot laugh and keep our distance We are forced to acknowledge that we watch, horrified but fascinated. Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times.
If anything deserves the dark masterpiece tag, this does a brilliant satirical insight into the neurotic, pornographic element in the act of filming, more relevant than ever in the age of reality television and CCTV. Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian.
There’s a constantly gorgeous surface – a handsome hero, lots of bright Technicolor – and a constant moral rot at play underneath. Mark Athitakis, filmcritic.com
