Augen der Angst

The film that did a large amount of damage to Michael Powell's film career remains as a prime example of an intellectual British horror film. It has certainly retained the power to shock over four decades later, and leaves the viewer with more questions than have been answered during the fairly short running time.

Carl Boehm plays Mark Lewis, a focus puller at a film studio who feeds his voyeuristic tendencies by filming people everyone he goes. This preoccupation takes a disturbing twist in his need to kill, and film women as he kills them. So far, so unsavoury. Mark appears on the surface as a personable young man who just has this dangerous, psychotic tendency he can't always keep in check. The audience is thus invited to have some sympathy with him, especially after the discovery that the young Mark was the focus for his father's experiments on the nature of fear in children (show in part as the film within the film featuring Michael Powell and his son Columba), and was filmed and recorded for the whole of his young life. No wonder, the film is saying, that he has grown into this disturbed person who has no real life away from either recording things on a camera, or watching the results in his darkened room.

Anna Massey has perhaps the prime female role in the film, as Mark's downstairs neighbour Helen Stephens. She is both repelled and attracted by Mark's movie-making, and perhaps she is closer to him that she would herself admit. It is a restrained performance of considerable power. Moira Shearer has a brief appearance as the studio stand-in who becomes his victim, while Shirley Anne Field provides light relief as the film actress who can never get her lines right and doesn't know how to faint on camera.

‘Peeping Tom' is a clever piece of work which perhaps came too soon to be acceptable to the establishment. After all, during Powell's collaborations with Emeric Pressburger, they often pushed their luck with their subject matter and the way they presented it. This film was the natural progression of that anarchistic spirit. It is humorous in places – Mark is not presented as a one-dimensional monster – while being a very dark and disturbing psychological thriller throughout.

Peeping Tom is a philosophical movie that investigates the nature of perception, rather than an edge-of-the seat thriller. The phrase "snuff films" hadn't even been invented in 1960, nor did videotape cameras exist, so the movie was far in advance of its time. You might be disappointed if you looking for pure excitement, you have to be willing to examine deeper issues.

Carl Bohm is perfect in the role of the killer, and his faint German accent (which might be interpreted as a. psychogenic speech defect) adds to the creepiness of his character. Instead of an over-the-top maniac (Jack Nicholson, are you listening?), he portrays a frightened and insecure little person who can only relate to the world by looking at it, preferably through a camera lens. It is easy to condemn him for his obsession with peeping, but -um- aren't we doing the same thing by watching this movie, or any movie? The most interesting movies are those that provoke such questions in us. This aspect also helps explain why Peeping Tom was so fiercely condemned in 1960.

(The scenes between Bohm and Massey remind me of those between Gustav Diesel and Louise Brooks in the last part of Pandora's Box (1928), and you can bet the Michael Powell was familiar with Pabst's work.)

The idea that scrutiny = punishment was explored by Michel Foucault in his book Surveiller et Punir, which I happened to read a long time ago. We will be finding out more about this as the "National Security State" draws closer. Anyway, here you have a powerless little guy who tries to feel the same sense of control by turning his camera - literally - into a murder-weapon. The technical details of this contrivance seem unrealistic, but the symbolism is so powerful they scarcely matter.

The hard-edged sound of late-50s cool jazz works very nicely in setting the atmosphere, similar to Town Without Pity (1960). Nowadays we tend to think of that era as idyllic, so its useful to remind ourselves of the dark edges that existed.

It's difficult to imagine the effect that this film had on critics and audiences when first shown as in the 90's we have become desensitized by the violence and cruelty of slasher movies.

Yet even today this film is deeply disturbing. The lead character is portrayed in a sympathetic light, thanks to a stunning performance from Carl Boem. He is a victim of a cruel and abusive father, desperate to escape the curse that has been handed down to him. There are some memorable scenes: the home movie showing him and his father (played by Michael Powell and his own son), the shot of the beautiful model turning round and showing her hare lip and the projection of one of the murders to the blind mother, with part of the frame projecting onto the murderer.

This is a deeply unnerving film but brilliantly made. Go see.

I've watched Michael Powell['s PEEPING TOM a couple of times on TV but I've yet to give my Criterion DVD a spin. Certainly one of the most original, challenging and bleakest films ever made and to have come from a British film-maker, albeit an iconoclastic one, makes the achievement all the more remarkable. While I do think that comparisons to its contemporary PSYCHO (1960) are a bit tenuous, it has to be said that both films can be thought of as belonging to the horror genre – in fact, PEEPING TOM was the third British "slasher" movie in a row, following HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM (1959) and CIRCUS OF HORRORS (1960) - but can also lay claim to being a very dark sort of black comedy. Besides, both films feature dysfunctional, immature, adult male protagonists haunted by a terrible upbringing which vents itself in a series of murders. Furthermore, while both films have been harshly reviled by critics when first released, in time, they have had their reputations make a complete about face and nowadays are numbered among their respective directors' unassailable masterpieces!

Despite a long and distinguished career the production team of Powell and Pressberger were effectively ruined by the furore of criticism and demands for censorship generated by this film.

'Peeping Tom' is a great film and one that modern film makers could learn from. Even good films like 'Seven' and 'Silence of the Lambs' have a regretable tendency toward melodrama and gross overacting in the portrayal of serial killers. 'John Doe' (Kevin Spacey) and 'Buffalo Bill' (Ted Levine) are laughable travesties of their real life counterparts, who seem harmless when approaching or luring a potential victim.

One of the things that critics of his time could not forgive Powell is that he makes his killer 'Mark Lewis' (Karl Boehm) human and likeable. a sensitive and intelligent young man, he is the product of bestial cruelty inflicted upon him in childhood (the scenes showing film of him being tortured as a boy by his scientist father are horrifying in the true sense of the word)

This is a sophisticated film demanding of the viewer that he or she not only takes part in watching a compelling thriller but are also provoked into contemplating the forces that work on a man who commits such crimes.

After watching 'Peeping Tom' one does not have the customary closure common in such thrillers of seeing a 'monster' the viewer could not emphasise with destroyed and the world made safe again, (much the theory behind the justification of capital punishment). Rather we have the experience of seeing the tragic self destruction of a man arguably as much a victim as those he killed.

To critics this was reprehensible - 'siding with the murderer'. The man who wrote the script, however, knew at first hand what makes a killer - since he was responsible for selecting secret agents to fight behind enemy lines in World War 2. He had to choose men - and women - who would not hesitate to kill. How many writers can claim this level of insight?

'Peeping Tom' is a classic and I rate it an eye catching 9 out of 10