All Movie Guide Reviews
Michael Powell's controversial meditation on violence and voyeurism
effectively destroyed his career when it was first released, but later
generations have come to regard it as a masterpiece. Karl-Heinz Boehm stars
as Mark, the son of a psychologist who kept a video journal of the boy's
upbringing for research purposes. The constant intrusions profoundly
affected the boy, who grew up to be a photographer himself; but his
principal subject matter consists of women whom he murders before the
camera. He then runs the films of his victims in their final throes so that
he can study their reactions to death-a perverse extension of his father's
experiments, which tormented Mark to analyze his reactions to raw fear.
The
British press had long been hostile to the unorthodox films of Powell and
his partner Emeric Pressburger; when Peeping Tom came around, they used
the
film to castigate him as "sick" and tawdry. The passage of time has proven
Peeping Tom as profound and accomplished as any of Powell's earlier films,
and it ranks with Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958)
as a landmark exploration of the links among voyeurism, violence, and male
sexual desire. Powell himself plays the evil father in the flashback
sequences, and his son Colomba plays Mark as a child.
- Hal Erickson
It takes a pretty special film to destroy the career of one of Britain's
greatest directors practically overnight, and Peeping Tom is just that sort
of film. While its content isn't terribly shocking by today's standards
(at
least compared to the floodgates of gore opened by Blood Feast a few years
later), psychologically Peeping Tom has lost little (if any) of its
original, disturbing impact. Director Michael Powell, with tongue slightly
in cheek, once described Peeping Tom as a film about a film fan, and behind
Powell's jest lies the key to the film's impact. Mark Lewis (Karl-Heinz
Boehm) is a murderous voyeur who obsessively films the deaths of young women
(whom he stabs with the sharpened leg of a tripod); in the first few
minutes, as we watch one woman's agonies through the viewfinder of Mark's
camera, Powell forces us to watch Mark's crimes through his own eyes. And
later, as Karl views the deadly images projected onto a screen in rapt
silence, we see an unpleasant reflection of ourselves; if the appeal of
the
cinema is to a large degree voyeuristic, as the camera allows us to silently
observe the lives of the figures on screen, then Mark Lewis is the ultimate
extension of the ugly side of the filmgoing experience, taking erotic
pleasure in the pain and fear of the people he films, and Powell is all
too
willing to indicate the audience's complicity as they follow Mark's actions.
And while the standards of its day imposed certain limits on Powell, Peeping
Tom doesn't shy away from a clear focus on the fetishistic voyeurism
inherent in the story: Mark supplements his career as a focus puller by
doing cheesecake photography (at a time when the legality of girlie
magazines was still questionable in England); one bit of comic relief is
pegged on a timid man's buying under-the-counter pornography from a
tobacconist; and the U.K.'s most famous nude model of the day, Pamela Green,
appears in a small role (the relative equivalent of, say, giving Linda
Lovelace a supporting role in Frenzy). While Powell carefully documents
the
emotional conditions that made Mark what he is, he also clearly intimates
that his twisted psyche merely amplifies (and distorts) the voyeuristic
impulse that lurks in us all, making Mark Lewis unexpectedly sympathetic
and
the audience an unwitting accomplice in his crimes. While often compared
to
Psycho, another ground-breaking terror film of the same year, Peeping Tom
is
a more daring and audacious film than Alfred Hitchcock's masterful whodunit,
and it has more in common with Hitchcock's Rear Window. An unusually frank
and non-judgmental portrayal of deviant psychology and sexuality (Mark's
actions are not condoned, but he's more a tragic victim than a villain),
the
film asks questions and raises issues guaranteed to make nearly any audience
uncomfortable.
- Mark Deming
