First, the most famous killer review ...
"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.
Obviously there's a legitimate place in the cinema for genuine
psychological studies. But this crude, sensational exploitation
merely aims at giving the bluntest of cheap thrills. It
succeeds in being alternately dull and repellent. It is no
surprise that this is the work of Michael Powell, who
displayed his vulgarity in such films as A Matter of Life
and Death, The Red Shoes
and A Canterbury Tale. In PT his self-exposure goes even further.
He not only plays the sadistic father but uses his own child as the victim."
- Derek Hill, Tribune, 29 April 1960.
[What was vulgar in AMOLAD?]
Then a few others ...
"It's a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom... I
don't propose to name the players in this beastly picture."
- C. A. Lejeune, The Observer, 10 April 1960.
[Caroline walked out before it finished]
"Perhaps one would not be so disagreeably affected by this exercise in
the lower regions of the psychopathic, were it handled in a more bluntly
debased fashion. One does not, after all, waste much indignation on the
Draculas and Mummies and Stranglers of the last few years.
Peeping Tom is another matter.
It is made by a director of skill and sensibility, the same stylist's
view it is which now and then makes the torturer's stuff of the new
film look like the true imaginative thing, the Edgar Allan Poe horror,
instead of the vulgar squalor ut really is.
The director whose daring
and inquiring eye gave us the superb camera obscura sequence and the entry
into the operating room in A Matter of Life and Death.
Then one remembers that even in his best period Michael Powell would
suddenly devote his gifts to a story about a maniac who poured glue
over girls' hair.
He has got beyond glue here.
He has got to the trick knife lovingly embedded in the throat,
to the voyeur with sound effects, to a nauseating emphasis on the
preliminaries and the practice of sadism - and I mean sadism.
He did not write Peeping Tom; but he cannot wash his hands of
responsibility for this essentially vicious film."
- Dilys Powell, The Sunday Times, 10 April 1960.
[But see also
Dilys Powell's 1994 reappraisal
where she forgives him and apologises]
"The sickest and filthiest film I remember seeing"
- Isabel Quigly, The Spectator
"sadism, sex and the exploitation of human degradation"
- Leonard Mosley, Daily Express
"From its slumbering, mildly salacious beginning to its appallingly
masochistic and depraved climax, it is wholly evil"
- Nina Hibbin, Daily Worker
"A morbid desire to gaze is one of the commonest obsessions in life.
Unfortunately, Michael Powell's new film is just a clever but corrupt
exercise in shock tactics which displays a nervous fascination
with the perversion it illustrates. It exploits fears and inhibitions
for the lowest motives. It trades on the self-same kind of obsession
that it relates."
- Alexander Walker, Evening Standard, 7 April 1960
"In the last three and a half months... I have carted my travel-stained carcass to some of the filthiest and most festering slums in Asia. But nothing, nothing, nothing.neither the hopeless leper colonies of East Pakistan, the back streets of Bombay nor the gutters of Calcutta.has left me with such a feeling of nausea and depression as I got this week while sitting through a new British film called Peeping Tom."
- Len Mosley, Daily Express
What they have said since (quoted in Premiere, October 1999) ...
Derek Hill: "I've not seen Peeping Tom again, and I don't think
my reaction would be very different. What I remember finding so
abhorrent was that [Powell] seemed to relish toying with material that
demanded a more responsible approach."
David Robinson: "I was one of the antis at the time, then I warmed to it
and now I've gone a bit cold on it again. I think that at that time,
35 years ago, one was much more surprised, particularly in British
films, by something which was so personal. To a perceptive eye it was
quite an extrordinary piece of Sadism and up to that time there really
hadn't been any overt expressions of kinkiness in the commercial
cinema. It was more startling then. I think Sadism would still make
me uneasy, as it did then, not because I object to the portrayal
of Sadism - I love Bruñrl's L'Age d'Or - but because
it was so personal and one felt like one was prying".
Alexander Walker: "If I were writing a review of the film today I would
probably take a more sophisticated view of it, but I wouldn't
essentially change my opinion because I do think that there is an
unhealthy fascination with the material in the film. I saw it about
a year ago and it jogged my memory about how they were going to
make cuts in the film. I think some of the cuts might have made it a
better film if they'd been left in because they may have provided
a certain psychological validity that ought to be in the film."
[I wonder which cuts he's referring to?
Alexander Walker was also interviewed about Peeping Tom
for the documentary A Very British Psycho (on the Criterion
DVD) and he kept referring to it as Britain's first "snuff movie".
That's despite the fact that the only death we see is that of the
killer.]
Reviews of Peeping Tom have always been mixed and confused.
The New York Times ignored it in 1962, dismissed it in 1979, but in 1999 they decreed "visually elegant, endlessly perverse...its status as the kinkiest of cinema-conscious classics remains assured."
