Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

Michael Powell is probably the greatest English film director who did not “go Hollywood.” “The Red Shoes” (1948) is, deservedly, a favorite of many people, and he made a number of other outstanding films during the 1940s, including the Technicolor version of “The Thief of Baghdad” with Sabu, “I Know Where I’m Going!” with Wendy Hiller, “Stairway to Heaven” with David Niven and Kim Hunter, “Black Narcissus” and “The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp” with Deborah Kerr.

Legend is that his 1960 film about a serial killer, “Peeping Tom” nearly ended his career. I do not doubt that it shocked and horrified what little audience saw it then, but, as I said, Powell made outstanding films during the 1940s. Even if one considers “Peeping Tom” a masterpiece (as Martin Scorcese, for one, does), Powell had not been making important or very interesting films in the preceding years (since, perhaps “Tales of Hoffman,” which I have never seen).

1960 was the year in which another, more famous film by another English-born director about another shy and homicidal man was released. “Psycho” received more attention than “Peeping Tom” and did not keep Hitchcock from making more movies. “Peeping Tom” is more unsettling than “Psycho.” I would not say that “Peeping Tom” is scarier to watch than “Psycho.” Even on repeated viewings, knowing exactly what is going to happen, there is still suspense in “Psycho.” But “Peeping Tom” is scarier to think about.

“Peeping Tom” goes deeper in trying to implicate the audience with the killer. Mark Lewis is a much more cold-blooded murderer than Norman Bates: Mark knows exactly what he wants to see (indeed, capture on film and endlessly replay), and what he wants to see seems clinically accurate. I remember Norman Bates going out of control rather than killing for the pleasure of it. And most of “Psycho” does not focus on Norman Bates.

The violence is more graphically shown in “Psycho” then in "Peeping Tom," and movie-goers four decades later are desensitized to screen gore, and all-too familiar with serial killers, so it is not the violence itself which makes “Peeping Tom” even now very unsettling.

I am not quite sure what does make it so unsettling. The veteran German refugee Otto Helle’s (Queen of Spades, Olivier’s Richard III, The Ladykillers) cinematography is serviceable, and the music is so over-the-top that it detracts from suspense it aims to heighten.

Karl-Heinz Böhm (son of the great conductor Karl Böhm) was a conventionally handsome blond. That he sounds Germanic seems to fit with his upbringing as a human guinea pig for a sadistic scientist (played by Powell himself in the movies of his childhood that Mark has inherited ). The father was interested in fear and filmed his son’s terrors (terrors that the father engineered). I guess that what was done to Mark as a child is what is most unsettling about “Peeping Tom.” That Powell filmed his own eight-year-old son as the child in them is more unsettling still. The film father-scientist's study is in the league of various Nazi "scientific experiments" and it is probably the kind of complicity between the father and the viewer of the film (more than between the son and the viewer) that makes this so horrifying a film.

Although the clinical psychology of the film seems plausible, I find it difficult to believe that various women would trust Mark so easily. The dance by the would-be movie star Vivian (played by Moira Shearer, who played the object of obsession, Victoria Page in “The Red Shoes”), ostensibly “warming up” before Mark films her is hard to credit, and the determination to befriend (etc.) Mark by his downstairs housemate/tenant Helen Stephens (Anna Massey) also strains my credulity. Her whole character seems false to me. And even the charismatic Maxine Audley as Helen’s blind mother is unbelievable. If she can read him as easily as she seems to, she would do something(s) differently. In contrast, I don’t have any problem believing that the Janet Leigh and Martin Balsam characters in “Psycho” would put themselves in what turns out to be harm’s way.

I think that it possible to enjoy being scared by “Psycho.” It is possible to admire the camera technique in “Peeping Tom,” but I do not think it possible to enjoy the film. It is, perhaps, good to have a film in which the wish to portray serial killers seems as pathological as killing for pleasure is. Even more than in 1960, the question of why books and movies about serial killers are popular arises. (Although "Peeping Tom" was not profitable, the reason that films like "Hannibal", "Friday the 13th", etc. are made is that people pay to watch representations of sick people killing other people. It seems to me that there is plenty of complicity with serial killers to go around in our culture. . .)

* * * *
I would not recommend this film to anyone except historians of films or those who need to see every film Michael Powell made. Although I checked "not recommend," one cannot give 4 stars to something and not recommend it -- so why ask the question if the number of stars determines what appears as the answer? (On the whole set of badly thought-out multiple-choice sets forced on movie reviewers, see
http://www.epinions.com/content_6958124676.)



Recommended: No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age