Review: Peeping Tom

Michael Powell’s films were always a bit weird.

Even in the 30s and 40s, teamed with Hungarian scriptwriter Emeric Pressburger, his films were glaringly at odds with the norm – the stylised use of Technicolor, his fascination with psychology, his lingering, inquisitive camera, the cutting-edge special effects – always remaining quintessentially English. As Shakespeare added a small book’s worth of words and phrases to the English language, Powell added to film’s language. And before innovation is familiar, it’s odd, it’s just plain weird.

In Peeping Tom (1960), re-released on DVD and Blu-Ray 19 & 22 November, Michael Powell framed his weirdness in a sordid thriller, full of parental abuse, prostitution, and damaged individuals. He also explored and questioned the very art form he had enriched with classics like Black Narcissus, Red Shoes, and A Matter of Life and Death. He put the viewer in the position of voyeur, confronted them with the dark side of escapism, and poked fun at the hypocrisy of sexual moralising. The result was a film that all but ended his career.

Mark Lewis is the shy son of an experimental psychologist. He splits his time between jobs as a camera assistant in a local film studio, a porn photographer above a seedy tobacconist, and an embarrassed landlord. He’s also a serial killer, obsessed with capturing faces of fear on his 8mm camera (one victim is played by Red Shoes star Moira Shearer), behaviour rooted in the fear experiments his father subjected him to as a child (played by Michael Powell and his own son in flashback).

There’s an escape for Mark: an impressionable young female tenant who befriends him, who inspires him to confront his perversions. Perhaps that’s what repulsed the critics at the time. Not that he stabs prostitutes whilst filming them, but that the bad guy had a character, a range of emotions. Either way, a few months before Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho shocked then won over critics, Peeping Tom was deemed morally bankrupt and swiftly disappeared, taking with it Powell’s kudos in the British film industry.

But how does it stand in 2010? Today’s audience may need a little time to acclimatise. The acting is hammy, the tech on display archaic, and the solo piano soundtrack recalls unwelcome visions of a moody Mrs Mills. These are details of film fashion though, before Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro made naturalised grit and grimace de rigueur. As with everything in this film, a closer look makes an easy interpretation impossible – the modernist Kandinsky painting on the naïve girl’s wall; the gnarled, whiskey-guzzling blind mother as the film’s moral compass, played beautifully by Maxine Audley.

Fifty years later and it’s still utterly different to the status quo. There are some dated elements, but it’s still brave, anti-cliché filmmaking, from the subtle self-referencing narrative to the claustrophobic, prying camera. And, taken in context with Powell’s other films, it makes perfect sense – the ultimate achievement from a director who specialised in being plain weird.