Peeping Tom – 1960 | 109mins | Thriller | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Screenwriter Leo Marks approached Michael Powell with a Freudian film idea; Marks suggested, ‘How would you like to make a movie about a young man who kills people with his camera?’ to which Powell immediately replied ‘You’re on. Finance came from Anglo-Amalgamated at a total cost of around £ 130,000, as the company sought to emulate the success of Hammer Films low-budget horror productions. Powell later said that the film was ‘not about a diabolical murderer – it’s about a cameraman’. To play Mark, Powell first approached Dirk Bogarde who, after reading the script refused to play Mark – which irritated Powell a little. Laurence Harvey was next choice -’He would have completely resembled what we call a “focus puller”- but was unavailable’, and Powell finally settled on young German actor Carl Boehm. The character was to be an attractive, apparently normal young man, ‘a figure to disturb an audience by asking to be identified with’.

The story begins following the murder of a prostitute, Mark Lewis films onlookers’ faces from across the street. Helen Stephens and her blind mother live in the flat below Mark and Mrs Stephens senses something odd about the boy. Mark shows Helen film of himself as a child with his father, a scientist studying the psychology of fear. Helen is appalled at the film, which shows the child’s terrified reactions to his father’s experiments. Later, at the deserted film studios where Mark works, he pretends to make a screen test of Vivian but instead films her murder and hides the body, recording the horrified reactions to its discovery the next day during rehearsals. Learning that Mark is the son of the famous Professor Lewis, Inspector Gregg has him followed.

That night, Milly is murdered at the studio where Mark photographs models for ‘art’ magazines and the police head for his home where Helen has just discovered the film of Vivian’s murder. Mark tells Helen how he kills his victims, using the sharpened leg of his camera tripod while focusing a mirror on their faces so that they can see their own fear. Realising he cannot escape, Mark secures his camera to the wall to film his own suicide. The police discover him dead, stabbed like the others – the room filled with the long ago tape-recorded sound of his father telling him not to be frightened.

Powell later described Peeping Tom as ‘a very tender film… almost a romantic film’. The general consensus of opinion, however, did not agree, with the most extreme reaction that of Derek Hill in Tribune who fumed, ‘The only really satisfactory way to dispose of [the film would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer'. Other reviews were scarcely less damaging. Peeping Tom received an astounding amount of abuse from critics, with The Times virtually alone in not condemning the film. Criticisms flew over various aspects of the film, including the use of Powell's son Columba in the convincingly-filmed 'home movie' sequences. Again, Powell told The Times: 'My son understood what we were doing - I explained it all to him - and enjoyed joining in... I felt it gave the whole thing greater truth than if we had a routine child actor'.

Faced with such a hostile reception, Anglo-Amalgamated panicked and, according to Powell, 'yanked the film... cancelled the British distribution, and sold the negative as soon as they could to an obscure black-marketeer of films who tried to forget it'. By the time of its US release exactly two years later, Peeping Tom had been cut from 109 minutes to 86, with European released versions also suffering cuts. 'I was terribly surprised', said Powell. 'I had no idea that people were so innocent and puritan and inhibited as they were then'. A 1976 French re-release led the International Herald Tribune to report that the 'French laurels for Peeping Tom come late but they are richly deserved. A more gripping melodrama has not been projected on Parisian screens in a long time'. This began the long process of the film's revival, helped by Martin Scorsese's distribution of a full-length print in America. More than 20 years later, Powell told Films and Filming that he was still very surprised because they weren't just bad reviews but vicious attacks'. The general tone of reviews suggested that the director 'was morbid and diseased in my mind and was trying to influence other people to be the same. I don't think any director had a worse attack'.