Review of Peeping Tom: Special Edition

Introduction

Michael Powell enjoyed a long and successful partnership with Emeric Pressburger, making such classics as `A Matter of Life and Death`, `Black Narcissus`, `The Red Shoes` and `The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp`. In the late 1950s, he decided to make a film with Leo Marks, a wartime cryptographer who had written a story about Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Böhm, credited as Carl Boehm), who works as a focus puller and supplements his income by taking photographs for `under the counter` magazines. Mark was the subject of bizarre and cruel experiments by his father, who used him as a guinea pig in his research into fear. Mark spent his life, up until his father`s death, being recorded on tape and film and has developed an unhealthy relationship with the camera, to the point where he kills women, filming them as they die.

Mark lives upstairs in a shared house, keeping himself to himself, until Helen Stephens (Anna Massey) approaches him on her birthday and invites him to her party, which is attended by all the other lodgers. The two begin seeing each other, much to the dismay of Helen`s blind and alcoholic mother (Maxine Audley), who senses something about Mark that she doesn`t like.

Critical reception to the film was scathing. Derek Hill wrote in The Tribune that "The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Even then the stench would remain." and Isobel Quigley in The Spectator called it "the sickest and filthiest film I remember seeing", surpassing the horrors in George Franju`s horror masterpiece `Eyes Without a Face`. Carl Boehm recalls how guests of honour left the premier without even looking at him and Powell.

A huge fan of Michael Powell`s work, Martin Scorsese, together with other filmmakers including Bertrand Tavernier and Francis Ford Coppola, championed the film and it was released on DVD by the Criterion studio in 1999.

Video

Presented in anamorphic 1.78:1, the film looks terrific, with vibrant colours and good contrast - Otto Heller`s cinematography is superb.

Audio

A crystal clear mono soundtrack.

Features

Martin Scorsese provides an introduction to the film in which he talks briefly about the film.

The commentary by Ian Christie, a professor of film and media history, is interesting and authoritative without ever becoming dry.

`The Eye of the Beholder` documentary features interviews with Ian Christie, Martin Scorsese, Thelma Schoonmaker, academic Laura Mulvey, Karlheinz Böhm and Michael Powell`s son Columba. In just over 18 minutes they talk about the film from their own perspectives as critics, fans, family and actors and provide useful insights.

`The Strange Gaze of Mark Lewis` is a French documentary, runs at 24 minutes and has contributions from British film historian Charles Drazin, Bertrand Tavernier and Dr. Olivier Bouvet a psychiatrist-psychoanalyst. It is almost a companion piece to `The Eye of the Beholder`, with further discussion of the film.

In the interview with Michael Powell`s widow, Thelma Schoonmaker talks for 10 minutes about how she came to see the film, what she thought of it as a fan and the effect the film`s reception had on her husband.

There is also the original trailer and a behind-the-scenes photo gallery.

The booklet with an essay by the New Statesman`s film critic Ryan Gilbey, an extract from Michael Powell`s autobiography and an interview with Leo Marks is a fascinating read.

Conclusion

Lambasted on its release, `Peeping Tom` virtually finished Michael Powell`s career as a filmmaker, as he never recovered from the critical mauling his film received. Compared to the films he made with Emeric Pressburger, this marks a huge change in direction for Powell who, despite examining the human psyche in `Black Narcissus`, had never made a film as intense and terrifying as this.

The choice of Carl Boehm for the lead was a strange one, as the German actor had never made an English language film, but his clipped tones and reserved appearance suit the character perfectly, sounding slightly like Peter Lorre. Anna Massey was similarly inexperienced, having only made one film, and that was in a small role, but she is likewise perfectly cast and plays opposite Boehm beautifully.

I can only imagine that the critical mauling it received was because the critics were not expecting such an intelligent and terrifying examination of the mind of a psychopathic killer in which the audience sympathises with the murderer, and that a bawdy sex comedy about a peeping Tom would have received more favourable notices. Released in the same year as Hitchcock`s `Psycho`, `Peeping Tom` also has a socially inept serial killer as the main character, with scenes of incredible tension, but unlike `Psycho`, it has taken nearly 40 years for Powell`s film to be recognised as a masterpiece.