Director: Michael Powell.
Featuring: Carl Boehm, Anna Massey.
United Kingdom, 1960. 101 mins.
Well-known film critic Laura Mulvey writes: It is not only an extraordinary movie but it has an extraordinary history. On its release, it received such devastating reviews that it has slowly, over the last 30 or so years, been recognised as one of the British cinema’s most interesting films and, more generally, as one of the great films about cinema. Michael Powell himself held that the reception of Peeping Tom contributed to the collapse of his own career at the time. In his words, the distributors "cancelled the British distribution, and they sold the negative as soon as they could to an obscure black-marketer of films, who tried to forget it" and forgotten it was, along with its director, for 20 years.
When Peeping Tom was released in England in 1960, it was received with such viciousness and condemnation that the film was pulled out and disposed off in to a public dustbin of disdain and forgotton for the next twenty years or so. The scandal destroyed Michael Powell's career.
As the title suggests, Peeping Tom is a film about voyeurism. The plot is simple enough: A serial killer who uses his camera to shoot and stab his victims, Mark’s (Carl Boehm) dream is to make that ‘perfect film’ on fear that would make even his father proud of him. Into his life enters Helen (Anna Massey), who he falls in love with. Though he wants to change, he cannot and ends up killing three women, before killing himself in the same terrifying way.
It may be difficult now to understand the fury over the film and it’s denunciation by British critics when it was released. It probably is a reflection of attitudes towards peeping toms in those times. While the overt reason for the devastating reviews can be seen to stem from the film's rather sympathetic portrayal of a ‘peeping tom’ who murders several women, the actual uneasiness was more due to the manner in which Powell implicates the filmgoer in the process of voyeurism and sadism and exposes the film industry’s reiteration of gender divide with the woman constructed as something to be looked at. Powell was also virulently attacked for putting himself forward as the mean and manic scientist father while making his son act the role of young Mark!
In this centenary of Powell, all this may seem a bit unreal - if serial killers are dealt with understanding and insight, it is no longer shocking. Film theory has made common-place notions of voyeurism and scopophilia. But Peeping Tom continues to be a disturbing film. Brilliantly scripted by Leo Marks, it raises questions that continue to agonise us: Is Mark Lewis the peeping tom? Or is it the father? Or the filmmaker? Or the viewer?
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