Peeping Tom (1960)

I’ve heard that Billy Wilder felt the audacity of this picture about a disturbed young man who kills women with his camera, is what ensured no one would bother to feel offended by his little adultery comedy The Apartment, which went on to win that years best picture Oscar. Released earlier the same year as Psycho, Peeping Tom scandalized audiences, earned the almost universal condemnation of critics, and effectively ended the career of director Michael Powell. Re-discovered by a later generation of film enthusiasts, including Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppala, Peeping Tom has had its reputation rehabilitated to that of a minor classic, and now has something of a cult following.

The story was the brain child of Leo Marks, once a code breaker for MI-5 and an associate of director Powell. The two had originally intended to make a film about the work of Sigmund Freud, but when it became known that John Houston was planning a similar project, the original idea was shelved. Powell reportedly took instantly to Marks rather thematically daring script idea, and having now seen the film I am forced into something of a re-examination of how I had viewed the great British director.

One should not make the mistake of circumscribing a man by his films, though I suppose its easy to do. Watching the films Powell directed during his fifteen-plus year partnership with Emrich Pressberger, one might be shocked that he would even consider such a project. The Powell/Pressberger films where noted for a certain tempered sentimentality, a companionate idealism combined with a playful sense of humor and often bold visual sense. From Peeping Tom one can see the Powell had the boldness and creativity to spare, even I dare say some of the compassion, but it was Pressberger (who was in charge of the scripts in the partnership) who held the string on his kite and allowed their films to fly with distributers and the general public. In a documentary on P & P included as a special feature on The 49th Parallel DVD, you can see Pressberger occasionally give Powell a look of ‘sometimes you go to far’. Indeed as Powell would insist that his two young sons sit in on the filming of Peeping Tom’s brief nude scene (one so briefly on screen that I didn’t even notice it the first time through), that the director was a complicated son of a gun is plain to be seen.

However I don’t find Peeping Tom to have been a mean spirted film, many of those who panned it on its first release have since acknowledged this (that its not mean spirted, not my assessment that its not, though the latter would be nice). There is much to examen and consider in the film, it’s very intricately constructed, and hints at much more then it spells out. Sexual obsession, castration complex, and camera as fetish object/substitute phallic (thematic left overs from the original Freud project) (1). An examination of British social class roles, witness were the killer lives versus where he takes his victims, as well as exposer of the wide spread presence of porn underneath the bland exterior of contemporary British life (the Miles Malleson scene). Then there’s the films examination of film: the murderer is a camera man/aspiring film director, the parody of English cinema in the films film-within-the film ‘The Walls are Closing In’,and references to Fritz Lang’s M (in Carl Boehm’s characterization of the killer), and Moira Shearer’s dancing number echoing those in the other two Micheal Powell films in which she was cast (The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman). All this and the father son dynamic, with Powell in flashback playing the murder’s psychologically tortuous father, opposite his own real life son Columba. This is a thinking mans horror picture, though rendered in the same color tones as the schlocky shock films of the time (2).

Peeping Tom is a fascinating film of intriguing density and multiple layers of meaning. I wonder if this is what Scorsese himself will be going for in his forthcoming horror thriller Shutter Island. A reveling examination of the psychology of both its characters, and (with a pinch of salt) its makers. Grade: A

1) Notice also director Powell’s career long cinematic fetish for red-heads (Deborah Kerr, Moira Shearer), there are three, arguably four who play significant roles in this film alone.

2) Though a Dali like surrealism is also evident in the films first two shoots.