Being Film #29 for Hooptober 2024
It’s still difficult for me to reconcile the beautiful, captivating films made by Powell & Pressburger with the lurid, psychosexual menace of Powell’s 1960 solo outing Peeping Tom. On the one hand, I can see the use of color, the imaginative camera movement, the exquisite framing…even the emphasis on inner drama and turmoil and say “Yes, this is very much in keeping with Powell’s thematic output.” At the same time, this is also a progentitor for what would soon flourish in giallo, horror, and even slasher films. I think some of what I find so disturbing (and yet so good, lol) about the film is that conflict in my mind over Powell’s films. I’ll take it.
THE QUICK SUMMARY: Mark Lewis had a rough childhood, what with his psychoanalyst dad using him as a guinea pig to study the effects of fear. Try unpacking THAT childhood trauma and come away mentally unscathed. Mark couldn’t, and now he goes around with a blade hidden in his camera’s tripod, filming women watch themselves as they’re about to die. That’s not a spoiler – that happens in the first 5 minutes of the movie. The rest of the time we squirm as we watch Mark wrestle with his demons and his compulsions as they bump up against his affections for Helen, his young an innocent tenant he’s falling love with. You thought you were safe watching a Michael Powell film? You think this is The Red Shoes? The only thing red here is the blood flowing from the spike embedded in the throats of beautiful women!!!
Since we’re so close to the end of Hooptober, I’m going with more random thoughts than anything structured. Underneath the murder and Hitchcock influences there’s something here about English repression, family trauma, and the compulsion to film, film everything. Is it telling that Powell himself plays the father who psychologically tortures young Mark, instilling his fears and obsessions? I don’t want to read too much into it, but a lot of what I like about Peeping Tom (beyond its bountiful technical achievements) are the layers of interpretation Powell and screenwriter Leo Marks slather all over the film.
I don’t think Powell ever met a face he didn’t have his camera fall in love with, and in both Carl Boehm and Anna Massey as Mark and Helen he gets in really close, and their faces could tell the whole story if they had to. They’re both lovely performances, but let’s get real: Boehm is working on a crazy level. There’s such a delicacy to his features, a softness that he ruthlessly uses to present Mark as stilted in his development, a man and a child, unable to stop doing what he’s doing, and living in a dream that ultimately ends in tragedy, unable to resolve the horrors his father inflicted on him.
Extra props for the short but super effective sequence involving Maxine Audley as Helen’s blind mother who surprises Mark in his room where he watches his snuff films for some kind of sexual release (again, this is a Michael Powell movie!). She’s fantastic, and in a short role gives everything to both propel the narrative and reinforce Mark as a character. And extra, EXTRA props for the best sequence in Peeping Tom: the sublime sequence where Mark guides and then kills extra (sorry, “stand-in”) Vivian after hours in the movie studio where Mark works as a focus puller. Just incredible, and in her brief time on screen I think I fell in love with actress Moira Sheerer just a little bit.
Gorgeous 4K restoration from Criterion and Studio Canal, so peep this film when you get the chance!
Cinema Dual 
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