That the movie continues to provide controversy after all these years may be the best compliment in its behalf.
Released in 1960, about three months before Hitchcock's "Psycho," this unusual British suspense film was assailed by critics and viewers alike; so much so that its distinguished director, Michael Powell, was virtually run out of the country. Among the milder things said about it by one reviewer at the time: "The sickest and filthiest film I remember seeing." Indeed, its subject matter--voyeurism and murder--present a repulsive combination, yet by today's standards it all seems pretty tame.
It rarely shows up on television, though, except in a stripped-down version, and its reputation has largely been through word of mouth. Still, this bizarre little movie has acquired a devoted cult following over the past four decades, thanks more recently to its "rediscovery" by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese. Criterion's remastering, originally issued in 1994 on laser disc, makes it available for the first time on DVD in its complete, 101-minute form. It is a curious film, disturbing at times, fascinating at others, slow but seldom dull. For the mystery-suspense fan, it deserves consideration.
The film follows the actions of a young man, Mark Lewis, played by Carl Boehm, blonde, blue-eyed, and innocent of face and features, who, in fact, is a serial killer who murders his victims while filming them in their final moments of abject terror. The film studies the man, observes him in a variety of situations, and takes us into his thoughts. For a living, he works by day in a movie studio; in the evening he takes pornographic photographs. But it's his other avocation that most interests the viewer. Why would so seemingly wholesome a person as Mark indulge in such grotesque activities as killing and torture and then take pleasure in watching the films he has made of it?
The movie explains that Mark was raised as a kind of experiment by his scientist father, who chronicled every minute of young Mark's life on film and tape from the time he was born in order to study the effects of various traumas and external stimuli on the developing mind. As a result, Mark grew up a sort of "Truman Show" specimen gone wild. He came to love the camera and to love watching life and death and fear through his camera, more so than participating in life itself. When the story opens he is living alone in the home of his birth, his parents having died, paying the bills on the small money he receives from the film studio, the pornography shop, and the rental of several downstairs rooms. It is a newfound relationship with one of his tenants, a young woman played by Anna Massey, that prompts the central conflict in the film and eventually brings his perverse lifestyle to a close.
Obviously, the story is meant to be taken not only literally but symbolically; that is, not only as a case study in human depravity but as a reflection of every film viewer's obsession with voyeurism and violence. It has been suggested that "Peeping Tom" is as much about movie watching as it is about sexual frustration and serial killing. The film's writer, Leo Marks, was a code breaker during World War II, and he has said he wanted in "Peeping Tom" to write a story that tried solving the deepest secrets of the human psyche. Marks and director Powell succeed in creating a character whose innermost motivations are so well revealed that he becomes entirely sympathetic, which is probably why early critics and moviegoers so objected to it.
There is no air of quiet malice about this young psychopath as there is about Norman Bates. We begin to know and understand Mark so intimately that not only do we never fear or despise him, we never feel anything but compassion for him! That and the fact that the movie audience is made to feel as guilty of secret pleasures for watching and enjoying the film as the corrupt killer feels for his own crimes probably got it into trouble. As a consequence, the movie was withdrawn from distribution, the once respected Michael Powell ("The Red Shoes," "Black Narcissus," "The 49th Parallel," "The Thief of Bagdad") was reviled for the project, and he was forced to go to Australia to continue his career. The reception "Peeping Tom" got in England was so adverse that when Alfred Hitchcock heard about it, he decided to provide no advance press coverage for his own coming release, "Psycho," fearing a similar negative reaction might destroy his film, too, and his reputation the way it did Powell's.
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