Peeping Tom - How Michael Powell Got On The Wrong Side Of The Censor
He was one of the country's favourite filmmakers until a stab at slasher cinema upset, well... pretty much everyone, really.
The critical mauling meted out to Michael Powell’s proto-slasher movie Peeping Tom was exceptional. Writing in the Sunday Times, Dilys Powell described it as “essentially vicious”; while Derek Hill of the Tribune maintained that, if the film was flushed down a sewer “even then the stench would remain”.
But why such an extreme reaction to a film released in the same year as Hitchcock’s Psycho:? The answer lies in the way Peeping Tom breaks down the distance between audience and movie. In the picture, the murderer films his victims as he impales them on a sharpened tripod leg. But if we’re watching a voyeuristic killer, what does that say about our own capacity for voyeurism?
Although it was never officially banned - except by Reading Council - Peeping Tom was swiftly withdrawn from release in the UK, a victim weirdly of the British honours system. Apparently, Nat Cohen, the owner of distributors Anglo-Amalgamated, feared the negative press might screw up his chances of a knighthood.
Michael Powell’s career as a mainstream filmmaker, already in decline, was virtually ended by the controversy. And so the story might have ended but for Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, who’d long championed Powell’s collaborations with Emeric Pressburger (A Matter Of Life And Death, The Red Shoes, etc.). Thanks largely to this powerhouse pair, Peeping Tom was re-released in 1994 to rave reviews.