Review by a seller of the DVD on eBay
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.
