Michael Powell's
Peeping Tom, a psychological thriller about a troubled
young fellow (played by Carl Boehm) who likes to film the death-terrors
of the women he murders with the bayonet-sharp tripod of his camera, opened
in 1960 to the kind of reviews adirector dreams about. Dreams about, that
is, if he has dined lavishly on raw meat, rotten eggs and laudanum.
"It's a long time since a film disgusted me as much as
Peeping Tom,"
wrote CA Lejeune in the Observer.
Her's was one of the more generous notices.
The New Statesman critic said that it
"stinks more than anything else in British film since
The Stranglers of Bombay";
the Daily Telegraph called it
"nasty",
the Daily Worker
"perverted nonsense ... wholly evil";
Tribune's man declared that
"the only really satisfactory way to dispose of
Peeping Tom would be to
shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Even then the
stench would remain."
Understandably, the career of Michael Powell - once one of Britain's
leading directors, famous for
The Red Shoes,
A Matter of Life and Death,
Black Narcissus
and
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
- went into a
tailspin from which it never pulled out. He worked in television, made a
couple of features in Australia and spent a lot of time and energy setting
up projects that went nowhere. In one sense, his glory years were over.
In another, they were just about to dawn. From around 1970 onwards, critics
and directors gradually began, as they say, to "rediscover" the work of
Powell and his long-term collaborator Emeric Pressburger, and his last
years were spent bathed in the agreeable adulation of the young.
This revival is understandable enough: most viewers today will respond
warmly to that seductive blend of fantasy, humour, passion and restraint
that characterises the best Powell-Pressburger films, from
I Know Where I'm Going to
The Tales of Hoffmann.
But what of
Peeping Tom, that despised, sordid
little exploitation flick, that mad aberration made (in effect) at the end
of Powell's career, after he had split from Pressburger? If the jury is
still out, the defence has put up some extremely heavyweight witnesses:
Susan Sontag, who in On Photography calls
Peeping Tom "an extraordinary movie";
Pedro Almodovar, who in this month's Arena magazine nominates it as one
of the 10 best European films; and, most famously, Martin Scorsese,
who considers it, with Fellini's
8 1/2, the greatest film ever made about
film-making.
"8 1/2 captures the glamour and enjoyment of film-making,"
he says in Scorsese on Scorsese, "while
Peeping Tom shows the aggression of
it, how the camera violates."
It is easy to see why directors as possessed by the medium of film as
Scorsese should be at once enthralled and appalled by this portrait of the
director as psychotic, and should giggle nervously at one of Peeping Tom's
most quotable lines: "All this filming - it's not healthy." The question
of how far this movie for directors is also a movie for the general public
may become clearer in the next few weeks, following the release of
Peeping Tom
on video (including its sublimely tacky trailer,featuring a booming
voice-over by Valentine "The Man in Black" Dyall).
Sadly, Powell himself is no longer with us to join in the debate or enjoy
the rare spectacle of critics dining on humble pie. (The late Dilys Powell,
who had joined in the original mugging of Peeping Tom, wrote a few years
ago: "Today, I find I am convinced it is a masterpiece. If in some afterlife
conversation is permitted, I shall think it my duty to seek out Michael
Powell and apologise.") But Leo Marks, the man who originally conceived
this weird fable about seeing and slaying, is vigorously alive.
Marks's career, in many respects a good subject for the cinema itself, has
impinged on the movie business in many curious ways. His father owned the
bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road later immortalised by Helene Hanff and
made into a film starring Anthony Hopkins. He wrote the original story for
Sebastian, a thriller starring Dirk Bogarde and John Gielgud,
co-produced by Powell. And for the well-loved
Carve Her Name with Pride, the story of the
wartime intelligence heroine and martyr Violette Szabo, he provided a short
poem which has haunted so many people over the years that it remains,
according to staff at the South Banks's Poetry Library, the English verse
about which most callers enquire. It runs thus:
The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours
The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours
A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours
"The public seems to have the utmost difficulty," Marks recalls, "in
reconciling the author of that poem and the author of
Peeping Tom. But to me,
Peeping Tom is the poem."
The explanation for this cryptic remark lies in the field of cryptography.
Marks's words for Szabo were not a spontaneous
lyrical effusion, but an ingenious code, one of many such created by him
when he was head of agent codes for Special Operations Executive during
the Second World War - the full story will be revealed in hisautobiography
Between Silk and Cyanide, to be published later this year.
[Been out a while now (article written in '96)]
It was during his time with SOE that he first dreamt up the character of
Mark Lewis, Peeping Tom's anti-hero, whose name, as critics have pointed
out, is rather like a scrambled echo of "Leo Marks". (There are other
oddities in the film, whose script is full of mischievous jokes: challenged
at one point by a policeman who wants to know which paper he represents,
the voyeuristic Lewis replies, "The Observer.") Though Marks had, in fact,
known SOE agents afflicted by scopophilia, defined in the film as "the morbid
desire to gaze" ("They didn't attempt to treat it in those days, they just
sent people to prison"), the film has no other basis in his wartime
experience apart from the interesting consideration that "if you invent
code, you have to think visually" - that is, to strengthen your memory by
imagining visual structures, much as classical rhetoricians advised.
Marks - who still looks much like the "short, rugged, dark" cigar-smoking
figure in a formal black suit described by Powell in his memoirs - regards
Peeping Tom and its director with a combination of affection and
exasperation. (Though he admires all Powell's work, "my favourite would
be
A Matter of Life and Death. Not
Peeping Tom - that was more `a matter of death and death'.")
"He could be a difficult man, but he was also completely open
to suggestions. I remember that there was one dialogue scene he loved, but
I thought of a better idea: to scrap the dialogue and show Peeping Tom kissing
his camera. I phoned Michael at three in the morning - you could do that
- explained it to him and he said, `It's in!'."
As one might expect from the hand of a master cryptographer, the structure
of Peeping Tom is permeated with secrets. One of the reason why critics
and theorists became so excited about the film in the Seventies is because
of
the connection it appears to draw between Marks's morbid desire to gaze
and
our own fascination with the cinema. But one aspect of the film has been
little discussed - the precise nature of the film-within-the- film that
Lewis is making, sometimes defensively describing it as a "documentary",
though there are hints that it is really a feature film. In the original
version of the script, according to Marks, "we saw a scene from the film
that Peeping Tom is directing. But Michael cut that scene so he could put
in a dance routine by Moira Shearer. I have never forgiven that dance routine.
But would you like to know what the film Peeping Tom was making is all
about? The only other living person I've told the plot to is Martin
Scorsese, and he said, `That would make a wonderful movie!'" And so Marks
explains to me the story of the film-within-the-film of Peeping Tom. I'd
love to pass it on, but, as Marks knows better than anyone, it's important
to keep secrets under wraps.
