Peeping Tom (The Criterion Collection)
by Michael Powell
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DVD details
Actor: Anna Massey, Brenda Bruce, Karlheinz Böhm, Maxine Audley, Moira ShearerDirector: Michael Powell
Brand: Image Entertainment
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled)
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Special Edition, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 101 minutes
Published: 1999-11-01
DVD Release Date: 1999-11-16
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Criterion
DVD Reviews of Peeping Tom (The Criterion Collection)
DVD Review: "I like to understand what I'm shown."
Summary: 5 Stars
That's what Helen tells Mark in his projection room. Helen gets her wish later, when she watches a film Mark shot, and she gradually realizes it's not staged, but a real murder. Helen wants Mark to tell her that it's "just a film, isn't it?"
We've already seen the terror on the faces of women Mark has killed, so we know what Helen sees. We can't turn away any more than she can, even as she backs out of the room, knowing but not wanting to admit that the man she loves put a blade through women's throats and photographed them watching their own deaths with a mirror attached to the camera.
Like Psycho, Peeping Tom is the story of a grown-up child who can't get rid of a parent. But Peeping Tom is better. The characters in Peeping Tom are more believable than the puppets Hitchcock moves around to create his "pure cinema." As freakish as Norman Bates is, as a personification of insanity he's as much a straw figure as Mother in the attic.
Peeping Tom offended its audiences so much that it was pulled from theaters, wrecking director Michael Powell's career, so the story goes.
Peeping Tom isn't more violent or sexually explicit than other movies from the time. We turn away from the victims as Mark's blade enters their throats. Even when he uses his camera-weapon on himself we don't see any blood. More horrific is Anna Massey as Helen watching the snuff film Mark left on the projector. (Did he leave it for her to find because he wanted her to see "the documentary" he was making, the way she showed him the children's book she was writing?) The scene that made me cringe the most was Mark playing tape recordings his father (an experimental biologist) made while exposing his son to frightening stimuli. We hear the young Mark screaming; we have to imagine what is making him scream.
So Peeping Tom is upsetting, but also traditional. It hints more than it shows. Why did people react to it so much more violently than they did to Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) or Georges Franju's Eyes without a Face (1959)? Was it the just the difference between British vs. American or French sensibilities? Since World War II at least, the British have tolerated movie censorship more than other Europeans or Americans. Stanley Kubrick had the same kinds of problems with British critics and censors with A Clockwork Orange (1971) that Powell did with Peeping Tom. And Thatcherite Britain went nuts over the "video nasties" controversy in the 1980s.
When I finally saw the DVD of Peeping Tom, two things struck me that might have made people so upset when it came out.
First, the title may have led a lot of moviegoers to think they were going to get a softcore porn flick/thriller, like the "erotic thrillers" on video in the United States. When they didn't get lots of violence or nudity, maybe they felt cheated. Even worse than cheated, maybe they felt complicit. After you've been through the experience of watching Peeping Tom you know exactly who the title refers to. Audiences in 1960 might have resented Powell's holding a mirror up to them, the way that Mark held a mirror up to his victims as he plunged the knife in.
Another reason audiences may have hated the movie might be the sympathy shown to the murderer Mark. And two things in particular could have antagonized moviegoers - - Mark's youth and his German accent.
The look of Peeping Tom - - especially the outside locations - - at times is schizophrenic. It goes back and forth between the gaslit forties and the swinging sixties. Sometimes it looks like the Blitz is still going on, the city is dark, the buildings shadowy and decrepit. Sometimes it's sunny and you expect to see mods and rockers on the street. Are we going to run into Mrs. Miniver or Twiggy?
This tension is in the first scene. We see two generations come into a stationery shop that sells "French postcards." First a dirty old man, fat, drooling over pictures, then a healthy young girl whose innocence won't allow itself to be stained by the pornographer (the shop owner) and murderer (Mark) inches away. She's from a different world.
The handsome Aryan-looking Carl Boehm is Mark. He speaks fluent English, but with a definite German accent. Mark's father was a renowned scientist. We hear his voice on tape - - middle-class, educated, Received Pronunciation. Quite English.
Of the subject a little: Peeping Tom is interesting linguistically. In the film Anna Massey as Helen has an accent that's sounds a touch archaic (not stagy, it sounds natural, just a little old-fashioned). But in Massey's interview for the DVD, which must have been done forty years later, her accent sounds like the Standard English of today. We also hear a film studio executive pronounce "memo" as "MEE-mo." Not exactly the Great Vowel Shift of the fifteenth century, but interesting.
So Mark's father (working at the same time as the real behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner, who also observed, if not experimented on, his child at home) is English. Mark's mother is dead. If we want to invent a reason for Mark's accent I suppose his mother might have been German.
Mark would have had to have grown up speaking German in another country for his English to sound the way it does, though. Or maybe Mark's father was bilingual and he and his German wife spoke German to Mark as part of another experiment.
Whatever the reason is that Mark sounds like a German, that may have been the real reason British audiences in 1960 were repulsed by the movie. The Germans had been the enemy twice in half a century. People still alive had lost parents and children to German soldiers and bombs. How dare they expect us to feel sorry for this murdering Hun sex fiend. How dare they expect us to be glad for the Germans and their "economic miracle" when we had food rationing for years after the war we won.
How dare they say we're like him.
Description of Peeping Tom (The Criterion Collection)
A frank exploration of voyeurism and violence, Michael Powell's extraordinary film is the story of a psychopathic cameraman-his childhood traumas, sexual crises, and murderous revenge as an adult. Reviled by critics upon its initial release for its deeply unsettling subject matter, the film has since been hailed as a masterpiece.Michael Powell lays bare the cinema's dark voyeuristic underside in this disturbing 1960 psychodrama thriller. Handsome young Carl Boehm is Mark Lewis, a shy, socially clumsy young man shaped by the psychic scars of an emotionally abusive parent, in this case a psychologist father (Michael Powell in a perverse cameo) who subjected his son to nightmarish experiments in fear and recorded every interaction with a movie camera. Now Mark continues his father's work, sadistically killing young women with a phallic-like blade attached to his movie camera and filming their final, terrified moments for his definitive documentary on fear. Set in contemporary London, which Powell evokes in a lush, colorful seediness, this film presents Mark as much victim as villain and implicates the audience in his scopophilic activities as we become the spectators to his snuff film screenings. Comparisons to Hitchcock's Psycho, released the same year, are inevitable. Powell's film was reviled upon release, and it practically destroyed his career, ironic in light of the acclaim and success that greeted Psycho, but Powell's picture hit a little too close to home with its urban setting, full color photography, documentary techniques, and especially its uneasy connections between sex, violence, and the cinema. We can thank Martin Scorsese for sponsoring its 1979 rerelease, which presented the complete, uncut version to appreciative American audiences for the first time. This powerfully perverse film was years ahead of its time and remains one of the most disturbing and psychologically complex horror films ever made. --Sean Axmaker
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