Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Michael Powell
Starring: Carl Boehm, Anna Massey, Moira Shearer, Maxine Audley, Pamela Green,
Shirley Anne Field
While arguments can be made for earlier movies like
Thirteen Women and
Horrors of the Black Museum, 1960's double whammy of Hitchcock's
Psycho
and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom is generally regarded
as Year Zero for the slasher movie. The success of Hitchcock's film meant it
was immediately imitated, mostly by opportunists keen to replicate its
sensationalist rather than artistic achievements. Because it was much harder
to see, Peeping Tom influenced a different type of filmmaker,
one who saw how Powell took lurid subject matter and turned it into art. The
Europeans were the first to appreciate Powell's film, whose influence can be
seen in Germany's Krimi and Italy's Gialli thrillers. Later a generation of
Americans would absorb its influence into their work. Take any American
slasher of the classic era of the late '70s and early '80s, and you'll find
tropes laid down by Powell and screenwriter Leo Marks (the
latter a WWII code breaker who would later provide the voice of Satan for
Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ). In Peeping Tom we have the killer's subjective POV; the
flashbacks to a traumatic incident in the killer's past; the sexually active
female victims; the innocent yet precocious final girl; the elaborate method
of killing. Powell laid it all down here.
Carl Boehm, a German-Austrian actor whose handsome looks clash with
the nervous Peter Lorre-esque demeanour he adopts here, plays the role of
Mark Lewis, a focus-puller at a film studio who takes photos of nude models
to earn some cash on the side. Traumatised by his father's cruel experiments
as a child, Mark is compelled not only to kill young women but to record the
act with his film camera. Mark isn't the straightforward monster audiences
would have been used to in 1960 however, as while never excusing his
actions, the film gives us reason to feel sorry for the psychologically
tortured killer. The film's opening shot is a giant close-up of one of
Mark's eyes, which serves two purposes. It tells us we're in for a movie
about the act of watching, looking, observing, of voyeurism. A close-up of
an eye also makes the character in question appear vulnerable, as ever since
Bunuel dragged a razor blade across a cow's eye we've been primed to expect
some sort of trauma whenever a pupil is left exposed in such a way.
Immediately after that shot we see through the very same eye as we're
presented with Mark's POV through his camera viewfinder, its crosshairs
targeting a streetwalker who unwittingly takes Mark up to her room where she
meets her demise at his hands. Powell has pulled a trick on us, making us
feel a killer's vulnerability before then forcing us to see through his eyes
as he commits a heinous act. Is Powell saying that he views cinemagoers as
vulnerable victims of filmmakers' whims, or as willing accomplices?
Peeping Tom introduces an early example of the "final girl"
in Helen (Anna Massey), the young woman who lives with her blind
mother (Maxine Audley) in the flat below Mark's. While Mark's victims
are connected through being open with their sexuality and all too willing to
be photographed, Helen is far less glamorous and tellingly, she shows an
interest in the process of Mark's work rather than merely the results. Where
the other women simply want to be photographed, Helen wants to know how a
photograph is taken. "If I see a film I want to know what it means," she
expresses. Is this dichotomy between Helen and Mark's victims representative
of how a filmmaker views the two types of people who watch their films:
those who are simply there for the thrills and demand to receive something
from the filmmaker, and those who are willing to give something of
themselves to understand the filmmaker? It's telling that the more Helen
seems interested in being photographed, the more disturbed Mark becomes at
the idea that she may be corrupted by his gaze. Mark probably sees his
victims - a prostitute, a model and an actress (three professions considered
almost equally disreputable at the time) - as lost causes, but in Helen he
sees an unsullied innocence, the person he might have become if his father
hadn't used him as a guinea pig in his mad experiments. The sensitive woman
whose friendship only serves to further madden and confuse the killer would
later become a psycho-thriller trope, exemplified by the likes of Hayley
Mills in Twisted Nerve and Caroline Munro in
Maniac.
One of the first images we see in Peeping Tom is a subjective
shot of Mark discarding an empty film packet into a waste bin, as though
Powell is cheekily pre-empting his critics by suggesting he's making the
sort of film they believe belongs in the trash. He was certainly correct, as
the critical reception of English critics on Peeping Tom's release ended his career in the UK. The sort of vitriol that was largely
only hinted at in reviews of Psycho was fully unleashed
against Powell's film with one critic even suggesting the film should be
flushed down the toilet. That the movie provoked such a reaction is
testament to its power, and decades later it's the stuffy reviewers of the
era (some of Powell's most vociferous detractors were genuinely brilliant
critics, I might add) who are left with egg on their faces as
Peeping Tom is now considered a classic that has lost none of
its power.
Prior to rewatching Peeping Tom on Studiocanal's stunning new
bluray, the last time I had watched Powell's film was probably about 15 years
ago. So much has changed in our visual culture in the intervening years that
the film has gained a whole new aspect. Boehm's killer now feels less
representative of filmmakers and closer to today's "content creators,"
especially those YouTube pranksters who happily cross ethical lines to
capture extreme reactions from unsuspecting members of the public with their
hidden cameras. Something else struck me on this rewatch. Mark famously
dispatches his victims with the sharpened end of a camera tripod leg, upon
which is fixed a mirror that forces them to watch their own demise. What is
a tripod leg with a mirror at the end if not a forerunner of the selfie
stick? Peeping Tom is about voyeurism, the obsession of
watching others, but it's also about narcissism, the obsession with watching
ourselves. And we all know how Narcissus ended up.
