PEEPING TOM

Peeping Tom effectively destroyed its director’s career. Critics were scathing upon its original release (“It’s a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom,” “essentially vicious”) and no-one stepped forward to defend it. Michael Powell, who had directed some of the most celebrated films in British film history alongside Emeric Pressburger found himself outcast in the UK and had to find work in Australia and Germany where he made around six more films.

Focus puller and part time dirty photographer Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) meets a prostitute who charges the grand sum of £2 to follow her back to her boarding house. Once inside, he begins to film her, then unveils a spiked tripod leg and films the dawning look of terror on her face before killing her. Then, as the beginning credits begin to roll it cuts to Mark alone in his room, replaying the footage he shot with fascination.

Mark is revealed as a loner whose sex drive has been somehow twisted into voyeuristic mania, with murderous consequences - maybe brought on by the fact that Mark as a child was tortured by his father's psychoanalytical recordings of his reactions to fear while putting him through hideous experiments; one of which was being photographed next to his recently deceased mother. He decides to make a documentary, the ultimate in snuff movies – the capturing of fear in its most undiluted form, the last crystalline moments before certain, unavoidable death.

Outside of filming the documentary, he strikes up a relationship with Helen Stephens (Anna Massey) who is fascinated and disturbed by the films he shows her and even though he knows that this dalliance outside of his secure, safe world will probably end with his ultimate destruction, he carries on.

The film has many similarities to Fritz Lang’s ‘M’ and Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ of which the latter came out around the same time. It is interesting to note that if Hitchcock hadn’t included the piece at the end when Bates is clearly seen to be schizophrenic that ‘Psycho’ might have ended up receiving the same vehement attacks that ‘Peeping Tom’ did.

‘Peeping Tom’ is a true masterpiece and is as chilling now as it was when I first watched it many years ago. It hasn’t lost its power to shock and I think that this may be due to the fact that Mark is the ultimate anti-hero and you are forced to witness his acts of baseless murder and dare I say it, feel a degree of empathy towards him by the time the end credits roll?

Utterly chilling and no film that’s been made in the last twenty years can hold a candle up to it. Powell’s true, defining triumph. It’s such a shame that it took so long for people to recognise it as such.

10/10