Peeping Tom (1960)

There can't be many films that have had such a negative reaction that they have more or less destroyed a popular filmmaker's reputation overnight. Peeping Tom is one such film, and famed British director Michael Powell became so vilified in the press after its release that he was never again able to make a film in his native country. Even more unusual is that Peeping Tom has grown in popularity over the years and is now at the point where it is rightly considered a masterpiece, so why was the film so widely condemned on its initial release?
By 1960 Michael Powell was rightfully standing as one of the greatest living British filmmakers, possibly second only to Alfred Hitchcock himself. Though he had been making films since the early 30s, and had even assisted Hitchcock on some of his early films, it was in 1937 that he had his breakthrough with The Edge of the World. By the time World War II flared up, Powell was working with Emeric Pressburger, and the two forged one of the most productive partnerships in British cinema history. With Pressburger responsible for most of the stories, he would then collaborate with Powell on the screenplay, before Powell duly took on most responsibility for directing the pictures. They would both then work together on the final editing.

They had great success during the war with films such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), and A Matter of Life and Death (1946), but also carried this success immediately after the war with classics like the Oscar-winners Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). By the late 1950s their partnership was producing fewer films, and with notable less success than their earlier efforts. Because of this, in 1957 they disbanded their production company The Archers and went their separate ways. In 1959 Powell travelled to Spain to make Honeymoon!, a film intended as a Spanish version of The Red Shoes. Buoyed by its success, he then returned to Britain to make his next film - Peeping Tom.

Powell recruited Leo Marks to replace Pressburger as writer. Marks had been a cryptographer during the war, but afterwards had found some success writing plays and screenplays. The peeping Tom in question is Mark Lewis, a camera operator for a film crew, with aspirations of becoming a film director. He supplements this work with photographing models in various states of undress which are then sold under the counter in the local newsagents. Though he is a shy, reclusive man, he strikes up a friendship with the 21-year-old girl who lives downstairs, the innocent and kind-hearted Helen (Anna Massey).

Unlike Hitchcock's Psycho, released the same year (and of which there are many parallels with Peeping Tom, but more on that later), there is no question of who is the murderer here. In the first scene, though we see it from the viewpoint of his hidden camera, Mark meets a prostitute, accompanies her back to her room where we see the horror on her face as he terrifies her with the murder weapons before killing (though at this time his method is still hidden from the audience), and then returns to his room where he watches the film he has made. We even see him return to the scene of the crime, camera rolling, as he films the policemen carrying the prostitute's corpse from her room.
What's interesting about the killer in Peeping Tom is that we're given such an insight into why he feels this compulsion to commit murder. Yes, he's unhinged, but through family videos made by his late father, we see that he was abused by his father, who subjected his son to countless psychological experiments. He would put lizards in his son's bed to assess his response, and made recordings of his son's reaction to seeing his mother on her deathbed. He even wired the entire house to record every sound that was made, Big Brother-style. This is the house Mark still lives in, renting out the downstairs rooms to Helen and her mother. Though his father became a leading psychologist, he turned his son into a remorseless killer.

We see the conflict inside the nervous man, and when Helen eventually persuades him to go out with her without his camera, his demeanor completely alters, and he becomes cheerful and happy. This isn't a man who has a motive to kill, and he doesn't even seem to care whether he is apprehended by the police or not, he apparently does it purely because of the psychological damage inflicted upon him as a child.  So what are we supposed to feel for this murderer? Hate? Sympathy? Pity? I think that this is the main reason that the film was so vilified at the time, and it's interesting to see that many of the reviewers who so condemned it at the time only a few years later hailed it as a classic. Dilys Powell, who had initially written one such scathing review, even published a sincere apology to Michael Powell in the Radio Times. It was just a shame she waited for four years after Powell's death to do this.

Another very interesting point concerns a film that was released only a month after Peeping Tom - Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. By contemporary standards, Psycho was just as shocking as Peeping Tom, and both films had protagonists whose parents influence had let them to the stage where they had become murderers. Hitchcock noted the criticism that Powell's film had been subjected to, and wisely decided not to show Psycho at any press screenings, thereby leaving it up to the public to decide. Though in fact Psycho was also subjected to heavy criticism in the UK, this didn't dissuade the public from wanting to see it and it became a massive hit, while Peeping Tom was barely shown anywhere and became a massive failure for the studio.
It must have frustrated Powell to see Psycho enjoying such success, while his own film not only failed, but completely ruined his reputation. Especially considering the morale-boosting films of the wartime period that he had become famous for, it must have come as a huge shock to see a film with savage killings, nudity (the first mainstream British feature to show a topless woman, albeit very briefly), and no real happy ending. At least audiences knew what to expect from Hitchcock, even if in Psycho he tried to push the boundaries of what people expected.

Happily, well before Powell died people were already reappraising Peeping Tom, and Martin Scorsese had championed it as a masterpiece. Watching it nowadays, it's difficult to understand what got everyone so worked up, though the notoriously conservative British press must take the majority of the blame for suppressing the film for so long. Though Leo Marks had intended the lead part of Mark Lewis to be played by a British actor, Austrian actor Karlheinz Böhm turned out to be an excellent choice, and the way his personality effortlessly changes when he is separated from his camera really shows how disturbed a character he is. It can't have been an easy script to read either, and his role here surely killed Böhm's career in one fell swoop. Finally, something must be said about the cinematography. As you can see from some of the images here, the colours are heavily saturated, and it's gives the film a very punchy, comic-book feel. It works well and Peeping Tom certainly has a distinct style all of its own. Though he never particularly seemed to care about his reputation during his lifetime, at least Powell had the last laugh here, by making a truly classic film that was a good decade ahead of its time, it's just a shame that he was never able to make another in his native Britain.