100 - Peeping Tom
A journey through 'my' films.
Of course, they’re not ‘my’ films. However, whether I could watch them every day or would happily never see them again, these 100 films have had a marked impact on my life, my love of film, all manner of things, really.
Peeping Tom (1960)
Peeping Tom is the picture that effectively ended the career of one of Britain’s foremost filmmakers. From co-directing masterpieces like A Matter Of Life And Death, I Know Where I’m Going!, Black Narcissus and The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp to struggling to find TV work, it’s amazing to think one film had such an impact on Michael Powell’s life. At least, it is until you spend time with this astonishingly disturbing picture.
Karlheinz Böhm (here billed as ‘Carl Bohem’ to avoid confusion with his famous conductor father) stars as Mark Lewis, a feature film focus puller and occasional pornographer who is so fascinated with feat that he’s created a special camera that allows him to capture the expressions on women’s faces at the very moment he murders them. And when Mark has a spare minute or two, he likes nothing better than to kick back and study his ‘homes movies’. Yes, it really is as nasty as it sounds.
When Peeping Tom was released in 1960, there was serious talk about whether the film should be pulled from cinemas. As is so often the case, the passing of time means that a film some then considered “an atrocity” now seems neither gratuitous nor amoral. But while it might no longer appall, Peeping Tom still has the power to shock thanks to Powell’s masterful handing and Böhm’s detached performance.
Since he’s one of cinema’s most original directors, it’s strange to occasionally see Powell ‘homaging’ other directors (the opening scene alone owes debts to both Luis Buñuel and Jacques Tourneur). While he doffs his cap to his heroes, Powell’s ground-breaking first-person camerawork and unsparing lens laid down the tracks for his contemporaries - Peeping Tom would certainly seem to have had a bearing on Alfred Hitchcock’s last decade of filmmaking.
Similarly, leading man Böhm channels other great movie murderers (Peter Lorre’s child-killer from Fritz Lang’s M, Joseph Cotten’s Uncle Charlie from Hitch’s Shadow Of A Doubt) while roughing out blueprints for Michael Rooker’s vacant, ultra-violent Henry. Mark’s prey, meanwhile, are all the more fascinating for including acclaimed British actresses like Anna Massey, Shirley Anne Field, Brenda Bruce and Powell favourite Moira Shearer.
For a film that claims to be a study of fear, Peeping Tom has far more to say about middle-class sexual mores, and in particular the perversity of a society where the same shops the peddle children’s sweets also ‘vend’ views to ageing men in grubby raincoats.
Not that the film isn’t scary. On the contrary, this is a relentlessly frightening film, made all the more disturbing by the fact that, like all of Powell’s picture, it looks absolutely ravishing.