Tue 8 Oct 2013
A Movie Review by Walter Albert: PEEPING TOM (1960).
Posted by Steve under Crime Films , Reviews[5] Comments
PEEPING TOM. Anglo-Amalgamated Films, UK, 1960. Carl Boehm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley, Brenda Bruce. Director: Michael Powell.
Tom is a young photographer (English, but played incongruously by German actor Carl Boehm) who photographs the death-scenes of young women who imagine that he is giving them screen-tests. Boehm’s flat performance is chilling, and I find this film as disquieting as Hitchcock’s Psycho.
The camera eye seduces the victims and the audience, and there is an extended, bravura sequence in a film studio that portrays the protagonist’s heightened sexual excitement so graphically that many viewers may find it intensely disturbing.
The film was a box-office failure when it was first released (at a time when audiences preferred the Hammer films’ tamer eroticism) and virtually put an end to Powell’s film career. The director of such distinguished films as Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, and The Tales of Hoffman photographs this in bright, glossy color that make the scenes of violence all the more disturbing.
You may find this film disgusting, but I don’t think you will be insensitive to its power.
October 8th, 2013 at 6:08 pm
Walter, you’re not the first to make the apt comparison between this film and PSYCHO, and you’re quite right about its power to disturb. Which may account for the way it ended Powell’s career; filmgoers don’t mind being scared as much as they object to being upset.
October 8th, 2013 at 6:09 pm
This is one of the great films and at the time (1960), effectively ruined the career of an excellent director, Michael Powell.
Even today, it is still very effective but we have to wonder why the critics reacted the way they did. This film reminds us that the world was a very different place only 50 years ago in 1960.
October 9th, 2013 at 11:47 am
Far more disturbing than PSYCHO, if you ask me. Whereas PSYCHO shocks and frightens PEEPING TOM makes my flesh crawl and I find so much of it repellent. Because it is about watching movies PEEPING TOM makes the viewer complicit in the protagonist’s mad obsession in a way that PSYCHO does not. I find something to fascinate in every one of Powell’s movies. BLACK NARCISSUS may be my favorite of them all. So strange and histrionic and languorous all at once.
October 11th, 2013 at 2:41 pm
Powell and his partner Emeric Pressberger made films that were never exactly what you expect. In 49th Parallel they place you a comment on its own subject and creators and their audiencewith the fugitive Nazis, Black Narssisus is an erotic drama about sex haunted Anglican nuns, and this one disturbs even more.
This isn’t just entertainment, like Rear Window, it is a film that asks us to see our selves
October 11th, 2013 at 2:50 pm
Do note the use of both the subjective and the illusion of a hand held camera long before Lars Von Trier. It’s as if Powell set out to do everything he could to make the viewer uncomfortable.
What disturbs about this film is just how prosaic the terror is.