Review of Peeping Tom (1960) by Nick O — 15 Sep 2011

My solitary beef with the witty and visionary filmmaking legends Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger is their insistence in making their dark, personal tales from the crypt studio-friendly enough to draw in crowds, and only then pull one from under their noses. Well, as "Peeping Tom" goes to show, sometimes to get locked in the grimmest of grips the dudes behind the camera must be tasked with turning every trick while still acting awed at their own twisted talent as the dream bit by bit comes together. It's a burden that doesn't come easy, but which the director Powell -- who didn't write "Peeping Tom" (that was playwright and professional code-breaker Leo Marks), and without a partner at that -- communicates with stellar seniority and sincerity, desolation which takes new meaning in the wasted aftermath that was "Peeping Tom's" initial critical and audience acclaim.

I say let those poor bastards feel sorry. So would nod Mark Lewis, the protagonist played painstaking enough by German actor Carl Boehm to fit an entire career's worth of performances. Mark's a photographer working on a celluloid bomb-in-the-making, shot again and again at the suits' insistence and that of the prima donna starlet's crying shames. But what he really gets off on is his side project of giving models polaroids and stabbing them to death as their tough lip keeps up. There's no doubting the subtle intention of Mark's raging hard-on as they think they're telling him what's good. It makes the judgment more grand, and Powell in recurring POV style has the screen's tension nearly explode.

And he gets away with it, of course, because in the case of "Peeping Tom" the biting torture is psychological. Makes sense since Mark's the seed of a deranged clinician whose head studies he's forced on his son have only succeeded in shrinking Mark the man smaller and smaller as he's grown in time. Dad too had a fetish for capturing everything on tape but his own inner monstrosity. No one could stop him, we understand in sight of Mark sitting at his dying mother's bedside, footage he presents to Helen (Anna Massey), the woman trying on sympathy for the guy's horrors but has it mostly lost on her.

"Peeping Tom" is shear cinema driven by the very thing Mark shuts out -- emotion and fear. Only in the face of death does he realize the reflection of life he's himself become, and Powell scores big in setting up Mark as a lone gun walking a beat he scorns not being able to remember signing up for. The same tactics gave Hitchcock and Bergman their most notorious of peaks, and which shattered Powell's. Maybe it was the clash of voyeurism and disaffection folks all over just couldn't swallow. In a masterpiece so vexed, it warrants tears of an entirely different breed.