Submitted by
Dibyaduti Purkayastha (Tipu)
Peeping Tom (1960)
From "The 100 Best Films To Rent You've Never Heard Of"
By: David N. Meyer
ATTITUDE: Voyeuristic weirdness
MOOD: 1950's style psychosexual thriller
Michael Powell, apparently tired of being oblique, wrote & directed this
exercise in sadism & irresistable compulsion.
[Leo Marks wrote it]
Upon release, the film seemed a wilful act of subversion designed to undo
all of Powell's credibility, & it damn near succeeded. Once a banned scandal,
it's now rightly regarded as a classic. A film with the guts to name the
unnamable, an obsessive portrait of obsession. It is filmed without mercy
for the hero, the director, or the audience. And written with a cold, misanthropic
wit to rival Mark Twain's.
What many mistook as a straightforward paean to the worst urges of man is
actually a rather heartbreaking tale of an innocent gone awry, a gentle
soul turned horrible by vicious paternal attentions - attentions detailed
in nightmarish flashback. Those familiar with Powell's sense of humor will
not be surprised that Powell himself plays the terrible daddy.
The protagonist is a murderer of women, who kills with a movie camera to
which he has attached a long knife & a big mirror - representing Sex & Self-consciousness,
respectively. He stabs his victimes & films them as they watch themselves
die in the mirror. Naturally, being a film-maker, our murderer's true pleasure
lies not in murder nor even in filming, but in watching the film later.
Its a commentary on the vouyerism & the power of cinema, a telling parable
of the relationship between the filmer & the filmed, & its packed with more
cooky strangeness than 3 Coen Brothers pictures combined.
It is told in bright clear hues of Technicolor - not a single shadow in
this whole shadowy tale - at a pace suitable for a cough-syrup addict. It's
not for the squeamish, though it's perversely funny in its own awful way.
Also quite prescient in its depiction of a society dominated by the idea
that watching something equals controlling it.
The scenes of the killer running the footage of his murders launched a thousand
dumber horror movies (and 3 or 4 dazzling ones, like Manhunter) but Powell
cared not about similarities between his & lesser works. He had a message
regarding compulsion to deliver, & deliver it he did, without compromise.
Underlying the carnage is quite a moral lession in the responsibilities
in pointing a camera. And as in all of Powell's films, every technical aspect
is simply perfect.
Varied & amusing subtext for the film sophisticate &, it must be said, plenty
of cheap thrills for the horror junkie.
