"Peeping Tom" Review

 

by Daniel White

When I was a teenager living in the suburbs of Connecticut, I watched Robert Altman's Nashville on television. Chopped up by the network (ABC?), and pockmarked by commercials, I still innately knew it was a masterpiece, and it changed the way I would look at motion pictures forever.

I am 58 now and no longer an impressionable boy of 15, yet Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) has had a similar effect on me. It's a powerful game changer, a movie that has reinforced my devotion to film. I'm so gaga over this flick that part of me is fearful at the thought of not paying it a proper and fitting homage.

Carl Boehm is the Peeping Tom of the title, a shy, reserved young man who compulsively kills women, filming them at the same time. His choice of weapon? A stiletto hidden inside his camera tripod. The movie opens with the murder of a prostitute he meets on the street. The scene is extraordinary, a mock set, with muted colors of brown and green except for the woman's skirt, which is a bold red. Powell's use of the color red is striking; it symbolizes passion, rage, and lust (red light district). Later on, when the streetwalker's body is taken away to the morgue, she's covered in a flaming red blanket. If Hitchcock went back to B&W to give us Psycho, Powell amps up his film with vivid colors and it is equally effective.

Comparisons with Psycho are inevitable. Both were released in 1960, both about a socially awkward boy/man who can only communicate through violence, and both the victims of an abusive, domineering parent. Yet while Psycho was another success for the rotund Englishman living in America, Peeping Tom was reviled, practically ruining Powell's career as a filmmaker.

Why? Because it was an atypical film for Powell and the critics and audiences felt betrayed? Possibly. Maybe because it partially takes place in the world of prostitution and pornography (in one scene, an elderly man is looking at smut pictures in a news store. Abruptly a young girl bursts in, asking for a candy bar. Suddenly we are all complicit in the dirtiness).The reviews were scathing, one critic said "the film was more depressing than the leper colonies of East Pakistan." I found it exciting, invigorating, a cinematic shot in the arm. Like Nashville, Peeping Tom is a masterpiece, and essential viewing for all lovers of film.

There is so much of interest in this flick, that one look-see and one tribute by a fawning film buff is not only inadequate, it is a disservice. Yet I felt compelled to write this piece and let the world know (if it doesn't already) that Peeping Tom is a movie that mesmerizes.

How I can call myself a lover of film but have never seen this priceless gem makes me want to hang my head in shame. Dancer/actress Moira Shearer's birthday was last week and I wanted to pay my respects. I started with The Red Shoes, but yearning for something more sordid and base, went looking for Peeping Tom. I found it on Tubi, and it has been playing repeatedly on my television since late last night. I will return to Moira and her shoes, but for now I am sated with her wonderful extended cameo in this movie, and in awe of Powell who can take the woman he turned into a star, and treat her with such disdain here (spoiler alert, she ends up being stuffed in a trunk).

With Anna Massey as the girl downstairs who falls for our sensitive serial killer, Maxine Audley as her blind mum, who senses that there is something a bit off about him, and Shirley Anne Field as a difficult starlet, Peeping Tom is streaming on Tubi, in a beautifully vibrant, rich copy alive with color.