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Peeping Tom [VHS]

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Michael Powell is one of the great British film directors, his credits including such diverse fare as The Thief of Baghdad, the Red Shoes and the unforgettable Stairway to Heaven. Peeping tom was his first and only foray into horror.Though this film is often compared to Psycho (Powell worked with Hitchcock in the 20's and 30's before Hitch moved to the States), it is different in several respects. First, the film is told entirely from the point of view of the killer. we don't have the luxury of really getting to know our victims the way Hitch lets us know Marion Crane. Secondly, our killer, Mark Lewis (played quietly by Karl Boehm), seems to regard his being caught by police as inevitable, and is in fact preparing to film his apprehenshion as part of his perverse "fear documentary". Thirdly, Powell filmed his masterpiece in sickeningly vivid color, allowing us no distance between the killer and his acts.The film was critically reviled upon its initial release in 1960. Though sad, it's easy to understand. Powell wanted to include the audience in Mark's disturbing voyeurism, essentially implicating them as well. Since film are essentially a socially acceptable form of voyeurism, it's easy to see why critics, who make their living watching movies, might have been insulted. Since critics are to the arts what pigeons are to statuary, they deserve it.Many people might shrink from this movie due to its disturbing nature and lurid subject matter. Too bad. It's very well made and has something pertinent to say about cinema, human psychology, and the world around us. Many people sometimes think that movies about bad people are bad cinema. The only depressing movies are badly made ones. Peeping Tom is a great movie about a bad person.

This wonderfully creepy 1960 horror film predates Psycho by about 3 months and predates the "slasher" film by about 16 years and, in braving new ground which deviated from the Gothic Horror film movement spawned by Hammer Films in 1957, helped move horror from the Gothic castles to the house next door.Michael Powell's film presents us with a young man who is so fascinated by the subject of fear, that he stalks young women and kills them while filming their deaths with his movie camera. In to the young man's world, comes a young woman who only wants to understand him and love him, but will she find out his horrible secret before its too late?While lambasted by critics who condemend the film for being "The sickets and filthiest film I can remember seeing . . .", Peeping Tom in one of the most interesting horror films of the early 60s. It was the critical attacks against the film and Powell himself which prompted Hitchcock not to have a critics screening for his new film about a killer, "Psycho", which premiered a few months later.This Criterion release has all the thrills of the laser disk release (trailers, audio commentary, still gallery) plus a wonderful BBC documentary on the making of Peeping Tom called "A Very British Psycho".A fine presention of a classicly disturbing film. WELL DONE !

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.

When Peeping Tom was first released in 1960, it was universally reviled by critics and audiences alike for its sadism and mixing of sex and violence, and essentially ended the career of its director, Michael Powell. To say it was misunderstood at the time would be an understatement, as over time it has come to be recognized as a masterpiece of filmmaking. It is often compared with Psycho in terms of shock value, but Peeping Tom's Mark Lewis makes Norman Bates look like the Easter Bunny by comparison.

Carl Boehm plays Mark Lewis, by day a camera assistant at a film studio, by night a photographer for girly magazines who murders women and films them while he's doing so. Why does he do so? It gives him a sexual rush to see the fear in their eyes when they realize they are going to be killed. His father was a biologist, he explains to Helen (Anna Massey), a young woman who lives in his building, and his father was especially interested in fear in children, so he made Mark a test subject. You can see the connection here: a bruised childhood leading to abnormal adult behavior.

The relationship between Mark and Helen is a peculiar one. She is terribly curious about him; at first she seems to think he's a nice young man, but during their first encounter, Mark shows her some strange film and she becomes outraged, yet she does not run away. Her interest in him seems to only grow, despite his clearly creepy ways. In an ordinary film, Mark would be a villain, and we would hate him, because he is a murderer. But what Peeping Tom asks is for us to sympathize with this man, because it is not entirely his fault that he is the way he is. The major conflict in the film is between Mark and himself, as he struggles to suppress his urges and contain his own fears.

This is a horror movie, but the only monster is a human, and that makes it all the more frightful, because it is horror rooted in reality. There are sick people like Mark Lewis out there in the world, and you read about them in the newspaper just about every day. Peeping Tom doesn't terrify with "Boo!" moments, but rather it works on a more cerebral level, letting the audience into the twisted mind of a killer.

So why was this film such a topic of controversy in 1960? Well, never before were audiences asked to look upon a sadistic killer as anything but an irredeemable evil person, and nobody was really expecting that. This film is the kind that is intended to disturb instead of entertain, and when you go to a movie expecting to be entertained and end up being disturbed instead, you tend not to look favorably on the movie. Peeping Tom has been an incredibly influential film for today's filmmakers, as its influences can be seen in films from Road to Perdition to Red Dragon. I highly recommend it to any fan of film and film history.

In a day and age where the importance of film in our society grows in leaps and bounds everyday, Michael Powell's devastating and completely unforgettable "Peeping Tom" levels the most convincing argument that we don't just watch films... we live them. The killer in "Peeping Tom" is a kind, shy, almost child-like man who, as the son of a scientist father forever obsessed with the fear of children, was tormented as a child. Many times his father would shine lights in the sleeping boy's eyes or drop lizards onto his bed in order to frighten the child, all the while recording his reactions on film. When the boy grows up, he carries on his father's work... maybe a little too well. He decides that the greatest fear experienced comes at the point of death. He conceals a knife in the tripod of his ever-present camera and films his victims as they slowly realize their fate. He also (in a move Hitchcock would envy) forces them to watch their own frightened faces with a small mirror attached to the front of the camera. He desires fear and he goes to extreme lengths to achieve it in his victims. The movie not only asks us to sympathize with the killer (played with a certain charm and yet an air of repellance by Carl Boehm) but also participate in his crimes. We see what he sees while filming them, while watching his footage at home, we are (very eerily) immersed into his film. We are right beside him, watching his victims and relishing in their terror. The camera the killer carries is more of an extension of himself then merely a way of recording what he sees. When his lovely neighbor kisses him, his face remains immobile, as if he doesn't quite know what's going on. But when she walks into the next room, he places his lips onto the lense of the camera and a look of pure passion crosses his face. When she is asking for his opinion on where she should place the pin he has given to her for a birthday present, his hands follow hers as if recording their movement. It is a film about film and about the experience of a moviegoer. Like Hitchcock's "Rear Window" it is a truly exhilarating and unnerving experience about sitting in a theater and not only watching what is going on, but living it. And loving it. No matter what is going on in front of your eyes. A classic.

When British director Michael Powell and screenwriter Leo Marks collaborated on the 1960 film "Peeping Tom," the two really thought they had something special. The movie about a mentally unstable young man caught in the clutches of his father's psychological experiments horrified audiences and critics alike. Obscene, depraved, wildly inappropriate--these were only a few of the milder labels attached to the film. The movie played less than a week in cinema houses throughout Britain before disappearing. Powell, come to find out, was so devastated by the response to his movie that he promptly left England for Australia, never to return. In our crazy modern world, what people thought horribly twisted yesterday has an allure beyond reckoning for today's cranks. Thus, "Peeping Tom" has now become a movie lionized by modern filmmakers, students of film history, and critics. The Criterion Collection's release of the movie goes so far as to call Powell's film a "British 'Psycho.'" Well, I wouldn't go that far, but the movie is intriguing considering the date of its release (1960) and the subject matter it fearlessly tackles.

Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) spends his days working the cameras at a film studio and his nights moonlighting as pin-up photographer and documentarian. He always carries a camera wherever he goes, photographing seemingly mundane objects as buildings and people. Lewis seems like a harmless sort of chap, but the dark secrets swirling in his mind would give the stoutest soul pause. He is a Peeping Tom, always gazing into windows or using his camera to spy on the intimate details of other people's lives. His illness seems to come from his childhood, when his famous psychologist father used Mark as a test subject in his work on human fears. Father would set up a camera in different rooms of the house, along with a tape recorder, and proceed to torment his son in various ways in order to monitor the boy's reaction. At some point in the proceedings, young Mark equated women with his terror fits, and as a full grown man he has decided to conduct his own amateur experiments. With camera and tripod firmly in tow, Lewis tricks women into situations where he can murder them and record their fear on celluloid. His first victim is a woman of the night, the next a would be actress at the studio. Mark initially gets away with his crimes because he blends easily into the background. He's polite to a fault, quiet in manner and movement, and solitary. He spends most of his time in the huge dark room at his house, endlessly replaying his sordid film footage and anguishing over his painful childhood.

Enter Helen Stephens (Anna Massey), an aspiring author and tenant in Lewis's house. Young Stephens notices Mark when she sees him staring into her apartment during her birthday party. Intrigued, Helen follows Lewis up to his apartment, discovers he owns the house and acts as its landlord, and witnesses some of his bizarre behavior. Despite the uneasiness of their first meeting, Mark and Helen become fast friends. In fact, Lewis takes such a shine to Helen that the mere idea of "photographing" her--code for committing another murder--shocks him to the very marrow of his being. Helen really likes this man even though her blind, alcoholic mother despises young Lewis because she has an intuition that he is up to no good. Things begin to turn south for Mark when the police launch an investigation into the murders, Helen's mother confronts him about his activities, and he learns that his little problem will take years of therapy to overcome. Lewis loses his cool as the authorities close in but discovers a peace of sorts during the film's conclusion.

Modern audiences will scratch their heads as they try to figure out why "Peeping Tom" was so controversial when it first came out. I think the primary reason this movie shocked British moviegoers and critics concerns how the movie presents such an appalling criminal as a figure worthy of sympathy and outright pity. No one wants to feel for a murderer of young women, but Powell's movie often gives Boehm's character endearing traits. When Helen comes to Mark requesting his aid with the photographs in her soon to be published book, Lewis visibly enthuses that anyone would honor him with such a request. The guy is genuinely happy about Helen's success, and further confounds audience perceptions by buying her a very nice brooch for her birthday. He gives her this gift not as a means for tricking her into a situation where he can victimize her, but because he likes her, respects her, and wants her to be happy. There are a few other reasons why "Peeping Tom" scandalized the British film industry, probably reasons best left unelaborated on here, but the film's refusal to judge Mark Lewis's behavior is probably the biggest reason for the insults heaped on this picture.

I liked the film even though it is a relatively bloodless affair. Carl Boehm's performance as the tortured Mark Lewis provides the primary impetus for viewing this film. He captures perfectly the concept of a scared, tormented little boy wrapped in a man's body. Hats off to Criterion as well; they did a grand job with the widescreen picture transfer and the heap of extras included on the disc. There's a stills gallery, a trailer for the film, a lengthy documentary about screenwriter Leo Marks, and a commentary by one of those hoity-toity film historians. Don't go into this movie looking for a gory thriller. What you will find is a colorful, quiet movie about a very disturbed young man looking for a way out of his personal darkness.

"Peeping Tom" is a film whose place in cinematic history cannot help but outweigh the critical value of the film itself. When it was released in Great Britain in 1960 it was universally condemned by the critics and pulled from released the first week, effectively ending the career of director Michael Powell ("I Know Where I'm Going," "Black Narcissus," "The Red Shoes"). "Peeping Tom" is about a young man who not only murders women, but who films them as he kills them. What upset the critics was that Powell used the perspective of the camera to turn the viewing audience into voyeurs as well, and that he made the murderer into a sympathetic figure.

Reducing "Peeping Tom" to the level of a slasher film misses the point, because this is much more of a psychological portrait of a troubled young man. Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) works as an assistant cameraman at a film studio and has trouble appreciating the difference between the real world and what he sees through the lens of a camera. Mark has another job, taking "views" of half naked women for the owner of the local news agent shope (Bartlett Mullins) to sell discretely to his customers. But Mark's voyeurism is ultimately not about sex, but rather about fear: provoking it and recording it. As Mark slowly opens up to Helen (Anna Massey), the girl who lives downstairs in his building who shows an interest in his work, we learn that his father was a psychologist who filmed his son in a series of disquieting experiments into the nature of fear. The boy is following in daddy's footsteps. Powell and screenwriter Leo Marks had wanted to do a film about the work of Sigmund Freud, but John Huston was working on "Freud" in Hollywood, so Marks suggest a story about a voyeuristic murderer as an alternative psychological thriller. Ultimately, the psychological dimensions of "Peeping Tom" outweigh the thriller elements and are what make this a noteworthy film.

"Peeping Tom" came out before "Psycho," and the comparisons are inevitable, although they seem as much the work of different times as of different directors. Part of it is that Powell is working in technicolor, with rich colors which work against the horror elements in the film. But we also have to take into account that Powell is not dealing with suspense as a key part of the equation and that there is nothing in "Peeping Tom" anywhere near the level of the shower scene in "Psycho." The key scene is the opening sequences, where we see Mark approach a prostitute on the street, his camera becomes the point of view for the audience, and we see the terror on this face of his first victim before she dies. Then, during the opening credits, we see Mark watching the film he has just shot. The film's opening sets up the rules for the game in this film and no doubt outraged the London film credits before the director's name appeared (shown over Mark's projector no less). Add to this the fact that Powell and his son played Mark's father and Mark as a child, and that probably outraged them more than the half naked women lounging around in display positions. Powell's leading man was the son of a noted Austrian conductor and Boehm's slight German accent probably afforded the critics the small confort that this twisted individual was not a proper English lad.

Since this is a Criterion Collection DVD the presentation of the film is done right, with a commentary track by film theorist Laura Mulvey who combines criticism of the film with the history of the film, cast, and crew. Serious film students will enjoy her insights and her comprehensive critique of the film as a true commentary on "Peeping Tom," and not the gay banter of actors and crew trying to come up with things to say that are so disappointing on so many commentary tracks. There is a theatrical trailer, whose tenor seems quite at odds with the film itself, a gallery of production stills, and a Channel 4 U.K. documentary "A Very British Psycho," which relates the controversy of the film and interviews screenwriter Leo Marks and the critics who bashed the film on its release in 1962. You cannot help but feel that while it was Michael Powell's directing career that was ended up this film, it was Marks who should have suffered more as the writer is at least as disturbing a personality as his fictional creation in the film.

I first saw this film back in the 80's on British television, and was completely unaware of its history and background. I found it a very striking film, which explores - using the device of a serial killer photographer - the voyeur that is, to some extent, in all of us.

The film is difficult to categorize; thriller, drama, psychological horror, romance... to some extent it's all of the above, but I guess I'd say it's closest to a psychological horror/thriller film. But be warned, you'll find no unstoppable cyborg killers, no chainsaw wielding crazies, no killer aliens bleeding acid, or teenagers being sliced `n' diced ad nauseum; if that's what you want, there're endless films, both good and bad, that will do the job. No, "Peeping Tom" deals with the desperate, abject "horror," that is born of a tortured human soul.

The film certainly doesn't hang around, and gets right down to business from the opening scene, which has the main character, a film technician named Mark Lewis, played by Karlheinz (Carl) Bohm, stalking and killing his first victim, one of London's many "streetwalkers." This opening scene sets the tone for most of the rest of the film, a feeling of seedy desperation.

Mark keeps it together in his everyday life, but he is horribly psychologically damaged by the "research" his father, a famed doctor of psychology, carried out on him as a child, and desperately driven to act out his own twisted revenge on those around him. Mark's father was researching the effects of fear on the human psyche, and used his own son as a clinical guinea pig throughout his childhood; now the child is grown, and driven by his own internal demons to complete his fathers work.

But Mark wants to take his fathers work one step forward, not only is he obsessed with `fear', but he is consumed with the idea of "seeing" it, of "capturing" the face of fear with his camera, as if somehow that will bring him the ultimate understanding. And so it is that he sets out to murder Women, and films their last moments as he does so, creating his own "snuff movies," that he watches over and over again in his darkened apartment, desperately looking for something that only he can see.

And while he's not working in a film studio, Mark earns a little extra on the side by shooting porno pics in a room over a newsagents! This actually leads to what is probably the only deliberately comical scene in the whole film, when Mark reports for `work' one evening, only to find an elderly gentleman in the shop perusing the special "views" that are for sale, "under the counter." There is a second scene in the film that raises a wry grin; Mark is in the street filming the police investigating his murder of the prostitute. A man walks up to him, and assuming he's a reporter, asks him what paper he works for, "Oh, The Observer," Mark replies with a knowing smile.

But Mark's life is not all horror and desperation; into it comes love and happiness in the shape of a girl, Helen Stevens, played by Anna Massey, who lives downstairs in his building. Helen is an ingenue, an innocent, in every sense of the word. She lives with her blind mother, and is as far removed from Mark's worlds, both his professional one at the studio and the porn operation "after hours," and his internal nightmare existence, as it is possible to be.

He opens up to her, and in a moment of trust, of empathy, shares with her a glimpse of his tortured childhood, by showing her some the film his father took of HIM, while he carried out his research! How can Mark reconcile these two worlds? Will he choose to live in the light with Helen, or will he be cast into horrifying darkness and damnation by his internal demons, driven to take ever greater risks in his quest to "see" what he so desperately needs to see; will Helen herself, or her mother, be sacrificed to this end?!

Karlheinz Bohm's performance as Mark is wonderful; he's a monster, he was MADE a monster by his own father, he knows it, but he's a monster all the same, only, he doesn't WANT to be a monster! And herein lies the "problem" with "Peeping Tom;" Mark is an incredibly sympathetic character! We the audience are aware of all this, and yet we want Mark to change, to be happy with Helen, to help her with the children's book she's writing, but he's a killer of Women, and worse, he's driven to kill time and time again. There's a scene where he `toys' with one of his victims on a studio soundstage that reminded me of the way a cat will `play' with a bird or mouse before moving in for the kill. An incredible, cold-blooded performance by Bohm.

It's difficult, if not impossible, to view the film NOW, with the sensibilities of those who watched when it came out in the early 60's. The film opened to a roaring, and unanimous, tide of disgust and revulsion on the part of the London critics, and was pulled from the cinema circuit within a week of its release. One of the worst reviews went as follows; "The only really satisfactory way to dispose of "Peeping Tom" would be to shovel up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Even then the stench would remain!"

The film was "lost" for nearly 20 years, before being rediscovered by the likes of Martin Scorsese. This is still a somewhat uncomfortable film to watch, and the last 10 minutes or so, when Mark realizes the game is up, have lost none of their power to chill.

When I heard of the Peeping Tom DVD release from Criterion this sounded like the best thing that could happen to this great movie, one of my all-time favorites... Now that I've seen it: The documentary on the disc is excellent, and Criterions work on the image is almost brilliant as always, except for one thing:

Why, oh why Criterion, did you have to mess with the aspect ratio of this film? The original format is the old european widescreen ratio 1:1.66, the (anamorphic) transfer on the DVD now shows a cropped 1:1,78 that doesn't look quite right in some scenes. Please, please, please Criterion, don't do this kind of things again, you did, you can and you should do better.

A voice-over in the original trailer included on the DVD urgently shouts out the above message. See the trailer before the film and you'll be hooked. If you have never seen Peeping Tom you're in for a very pleasant surprise. This is a "cult" film that fully lives up to its reputation. It is an exciting, well-acted, expertly filmed masterpiece. Admirers of Hitchcock, especially of his "Psycho" (released later the same year, 1960) will find many points of comparison.

At the risk of seeming overly enthusiastic, I will say that the Criterion DVD issue of Peeping Tom is one of the finest, most satisfying video issues I have ever come across. Every aspect of this release is absolutely top-drawer. The film transfer is beautifully clear and looks almost new. In terms of audio the disc is also quite impressive with none of the tinny quality that some older films have. As for extras, this release is a total knockout: the audio commentary by critic Laura Mulvey is detailed and easy to follow; the 50-minute documentary "A Very British Psycho" is so fascinating it can't really be summed up here; and the original British trailer is a really worthwhile bonus. "Peeping Tom" should be required viewing for all interested in the possibilities of this art form.