lasttimeisaw Historically, PEEPING TOM is a presciently sympathetic take on sexual perversity that torpedoed Michael Powell's career, thanks to islanders' true-blue insularity, but has earned its overdue cachet through years when it reaches a wider audience around the globe, partially because its then-controversial topic now can be liberally appreciated as an incisive meta-reflection of cinema itself. Watching films is a de facto act of voyeurism, albeit a passive one, a prerequisite a spectator might subliminally intend to overlook when its more overtly entertaining value is in full swing, and in PEEPING TOM, Powell, drawing on Leo Marks deviant if dumbed-down script, formulates a lurid mise-en-scène of a fear-collector-turned-murderer young cinematographer Mark Lewis (Böhm, of SISSI trilogy fame), who is (sexually) obsessed with mortal fear engendered by his female victims when their last breaths begin to dawn on them, and he films their last moments and savors them in his solitary dark room. Also, he has a unique way to magnify their terror, which Powell tactfully reveals in the climax, as an answer to the film's innovative killer's viewfinder's POV in its prologue. Albeit its slasher (avant la lettre) template (suspense and horror is downplayed in favor of a manner of poised characterization), PEEPING TOM looks directly into the psychological cause of Mark's perversity, a child guinea-pig of his senseless scientist father, grows up in a disturbed, recorded and wired environment that substantially alters his perception and psyche. Critically, by dint of Böhm's taciturn, sensitive and inner-struggling performance, Powell pegs Mark as both a victimizer and a victim, an approach doesn't fall in line with moral rigidity but sequentially humanizes our monster, particularly, by pairing him with a guileless if somewhat cheeky girl-next-door Helen Stephens (a feisty Massey, holds our attention in her brilliant reaction shots when the crunch demands), to whom he might have a slender chance of a normal relationship if he can suppress his morbid proclivity (at one point, she even successfully persuades him to have a date with her without his phantom limb, the 16mm movie camera), yet that faint, precious chink of warmth is inevitably diminished after his another wanton surge, he has no alternative but to exact his final act to seal his preordained seal, and simultaneously, sate his persisting fixation.Apart from Massey's counterpoising presence of innocuousness, other two supporting performances are also noteworthy, famed ballerina Moira Shearer (in her third and last collaboration with Powell), as a clueless stand-in Vivian, obliviously twirls around Mark as he carefully prepare for her impending quietus, makes a striking example of a beauty's tragic end, which is sheer in contrast to Maxine Audley's steely lucidity as Helen's blind mother, who is luckily spared for her visual unresponsiveness, a thinly veiled metaphor of an aging/unassuming woman's vanishing sex appeal (she is only three years older than Shearer).Deeply steeped in its counter-genre variegated shades and musician Brian Easdale's compelling virtuosity and cadenza, to all intents and purposes, PEEPING TOM thrives as a thought-provoking tall tale whose message might be well ahead of its time, but in terms of cinematic grandeur, it is a trailblazer that often imitated but rarely eclipsed.

ElMaruecan82 And that's the essence of cinema...Basically, Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" is about a voyeur, but it doesn't just portray voyeurism as the mental illness of the main protagonist Mark Lewis, played by Carl Boehm, it also provides disturbing glimpses of his childhood where he was the object before becoming the subject. The film ventures in the realms of Freudian psychology and ends up being an extraordinary character study where the understanding of his Peeping Tom habits converge with the understanding of the essence of cinema. Film-making is all about the size of the scope, and whether you take the big or the small one, "Peeping Tom" never ceases to amaze.Now, a camera is a window to a person, it provides us an access we all long for in reality whether from the keyhole or behind sunglasses. Once there 's something that is hidden from our eyes, the challenge is to catch it, and when hidden rhymes with forbidden, there's twice more excitement. To give you an example, I'm a foot fetishist, and when a beautiful woman is sitting in front of me, she takes my eyes down as a form of discretion, while I'm just adjusting my sight to the right spot. I don't feel guilty inasmuch as I believe that everyone's got a fetish or a reason to be peeping.And cinema is simply about providing the perfect medium for a voyeurism that goes to the common denominator. Watching people in their intimate interactions puts us on a form of pedestal where for once, we forget about our reality, the one that enslaves us, to become the master eye, the Big Brother who watches. We can't change the story, that's the limit of our power, but we're powerful in the sense that we know nothing will ever happen to us, that's the edge we have, and that's the edge Mark Lewis has. That he's an aspiring filmmaker is no surprise, the filmmaker is also named the director, he's a God-like figure who catches his victim at the very instant of their death. But there's more.Mark, named after the screenwriter Leo Marks, never gets rid of his camera, which not only reinforces its status as a weapon but as something of a phallic value, like the source of a predator's power, aroused by his prey's powerlessness. The film opens with a murder seen in POV but in the next scene, we understand the roots of Mark's fantasies. There's no exhibition because the exhibitor is flattered over being a fantasy, but the excitement of Mark is to do what he does against his subject's will. This is why, of all the crimes, the most disturbing is the one that starts with a shooting and gradually turns into murder.This moment, starring an unforgettable Moira Shearer, is not only shocking but pivotal because it asserts the other form of perversity induced by the camera, it might show things we'd love to see, but it can also show the total opposite, murder, crime, violence. In reality we can close our eyes, turn our head, but that's the catch with cinema, it catches your eyes, but sometimes it makes your eye catch disturbing realities. "Peeping Tom" is a film of great artistic excellence but then it reaches heights of intelligence by submitting to our eyes the little voyeuristic games we love to play with ourselves and the trashy, sordid part of us. Never had another film toyed so masterfully with my emotions since "Man Bites Dog".And "Peeping Tom" has often been compared with its counterpart of the same year "Psycho", and "Psycho" made me think of what Hitchcock said to Truffaut about his preference for blonde uptight Nordic girls; they were volcanoes inside, Hitch loved to play with paradoxes, with people being well-spoken and educated only to hide mountains of sexual contradictions. "Peeping Tom" does highlight this tendency of British society and this might be the reason the film was trashed by the critics, and trashed is an understatement... maybe it confronted uptight pompousness to its trashy subconscious. Hitch wouldn't screen "Psycho" to the press to avoid similar backlash and the rest is history.And not the happiest one, Powell could never make movies again and if it wasn't for the film's revival driven by the New Hollywood generation, Martin Scorsese and Bertrand Tavernier, "Peeping Tom" wouldn't have lived a renaissance, and we might have missed its subversive intelligence and the pinnacle of Michael Powell's artistry. Artistry isn't just a word, you couldn't direct a more difficult film, one that shows crimes from the killer's perspective, then from the way they're shot by the camera and finally, from our perspective. It's a three-dimensionality of perceptions, one layer more disturbing than another.Mark was named after the screenwriter, and Powell played Mark's father in the footage, responsible for some of the most shocking conduct against a kid to be ever shown on a movie, that Powell's son played the son eliminates any doubt about the film's being a symbolization of the most pervert yet subversively brilliant aspect of film-making.And with the help of two great performances from Carl Boehm, soft-spoken, shy, handsome and crazy, the delightful Anna Massey who embodies our curiosity and her mother, Maxine Audley our suspicion, the film swings back and forth between the delights of watching and the horrors, the joy and the shock, the fascinating character study and introspection into the roots of voyeurism and the heart-pounding pioneer of slasher films, driven by an unforgettable jazzy tempo.Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" accomplishes something that has probably no equivalent in the history of cinema: it captures all in one film the two diametrically opposed applications of cinema or to be more technical, the eye of a camera. Indeed, it captures the soul of voyeurism by showing us that a camera can work as a double-edged sword... almost literally.

christopher-underwood This looks so good and appears far more seriously intended than the same years Psycho, yet I hesitate to enthuse. I feel it would have been a better idea to use a likable English actor in the central role and imbue him with a more subtle creepiness. It seems too easy to just make the baddie a German so that we may assume the worst. True, we are supplied with background evidence of abuse of the abuser, thanks to the survival of his father's films of him as a child and there is word from a psychiatrist towards the end regarding the needs of a pathological voyeur. But the real horror of the need to create fear in another to excite is not properly explored which is a shame especially as only a few years later the horrors of the Moors Murders would be upon us. Nevertheless the use of colour is extraordinary, the recreation of the seedy newsagents (complete with copies of the UK glamour digests, Spick and Span) the alley way prostitutes and the glamour photography wondrous. Anna Massey always strikes me as a most awkward actress but she does very well here almost covering up for the more tentative performance from Karlheinz Bohm as the man with the killer camera.

Alice Digsit I had a rather odd viewing of this film in that I half-watched it at a the house of friend of mine who happens to be colour-blind. We were talking and the sound was down for much of the time and I didn't see the beginning or the end. But what I saw mesmerised me.Having not really caught much of the plot except for moments when my host was making tea, I am reminded more of Blow-Up, made several years later, than of any other film. The main character of the film seemed to be photography itself, and the psychology of the antihero and his victims faded into insignificance in the fragmented view of the film that I had.Not only did cameras abound in the film, and were at once the means of vision - both in the sense of the making of film itself and also in the sense of being the main agency in allowing the protagonist to fulfil his aims - they are perhaps also cyphers for seeing and for viewpoint and for perspective and outlook, drawing the viewer into a world of questions on these subjects.What fascinated me most about the film though was the colour. This was frustrated by my only having my colour-blind friend to discuss it with, and while he does see quite a lot of colours he doesn't see them all and this undermines his interest in colour generally.This film was made long after 2-colour films were obsolete, yet the film is shot to look like 2-colour Technicolor. IMDb credits it as using Eastmancolor 35mm film, so the colour set-ups in the film are self-consciously reproducing an earlier era of film by controlled use of hair colourings, set design, light gels and costume. The palette of the film is fascinating and beautiful, revisiting the stylised colour gamut which had decades earlier - after it's initial impact - come to leave film audiences unsatisfied by its unrealism. By the time this film was shot audiences were accustomed to rich full-spectrum photography and the colouring of the film subverts that, while highlighting the beauty of the older films at their best with, perhaps, an added glow that memory and nostalgia and better technology can create.Having missed most of the plot of the film, I have no idea if this colour lushness is purely a sensual layer of technical beauty this film is imbued with or whether it has an important interaction with the film's philosophical or psychological elements - but it sure was good to look at.