Dave Rattigan

So I'm watching Peeping Tom for the first time in years, and I'm loving every minute of it. Profoundly disturbing, but brilliant...

And then I get to within ten minutes of the end, and the bloody disc just cuts out! Much faffing around, and still it won't play.

So now I guess I'm going to have to wait for a replacement disc before I get to see the end. Bah.

Mark O

That's terrible Dave!........Peeping Tom is my fave Movie too!, I've even had dreams in my sleep where there is yet another new version with just found 'extra bits'!

I was aware of the Movie before I had seen it, my first viewing I think on BBC2 circa 89/91, I recall buying some brand new Video tapes to tape it as I wanted a pristine copy, little did I know about DVD's and the latest 'special edition' back then!!

(.......and I still dream they find some missing footage!!)

Mark

Dave Rattigan

Managed to see the end (on another machine), minus about a minute somewhere in the middle.

Wow.

Someone tell me about the locations. The opening scene is so beautifully and surreally lit, it appears to be a studio, but there is obviously a real London street for the same setting the next day. So did they film the night scenes in a studio, or were they just incredibly lucky with the natural light?

penfold

studio for the night sequence, location for daylight. The locations are still there, in the corner block behind Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, very close to the Bfi, nicely. Newmans Passage is the alley, just off Rathbone St...at the other end of which is the newsagents with the studio above....

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

Steve Crook

See movie-locations.com for some pictures of the Newman Arms with the alley next to it and Powell's house (Mark's house was just across the road but has since been pulled down)

Their picture of the newsagents that sold the naughty pictures and had the studio above is the wrong shop. The real shop is actually a coffee bar now. But that one is still a newsagent so a lot of people assume that's the one used in the film

Other locations used are:

• off-set, Pinewood Studios, Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire (The sports car drives out through the gate and the studio scenes are filmed in there
• 29 Rathbone Street, London W1 (the newsagents)
• Newman Arms, Rathbone Street (the pub)
• Newman Passage, off Rathbone Street (the alley next to the pub)
• 5 Melbury Road, London W14 (Mark's house)
• 8 Melbury Road (Michael Powell's house: used for some scenes. The back garden for one)
• Whitefield Secondary Modern School, Claremont Road, Cricklewood, NW2 (The "Library" where Helen works)
• Clitterhouse Housing Estate, Claremont Road, Cricklewood, London NW2 (The council flats where Mark watches Helen come out of the "Library")

Who wants to do the "Peeping Tom location tour"? Bring your own camera - and tripod

Steve

Mark O

Thanks for the info on Melbury Road Steve, I must pay a visit next time I'm 'Travelcarding'!........I was a little confused on my first visit to Rathbone Street about the Newsagent, as both Shops are very similar, but I eventually clicked it was the Coffee Bar......

a few amateur pics........

http://www.britmovie.co.uk/forums/yo...eping-tom.html

Mark

Steve Crook

The other thing is the doorway in Newman Passage. In the film, we see Mark & Millie walk along Newman Passage. Then Mark throws the film box into the dustbin and follows Millie through the doorway. The stairs go straight up ahead of them.

In reality, Newman Passage is just the same (except that the sign had gone last time I was there). They really did film that part there. But when you open the door the stairs go up to the left, and they always did. They go up to the pie shop above the pub. So they must have filmed that in the studio.

BTW They're not the best pies I've ever had, but the beer in the pub is very good

Steve

Moor Larkin

Do you think Michael Powell based his movie idea on an actual psychological case study? Seems a coincidence between this and Hitchock's Psycho. They both seemed to be based on a similar 'frightened little boy' idea.

I could google but I thought I'd let someone tell me.

Steve Crook

Peeping Tom and Psycho were made at the same time, but independently. Neither knew the other was doing something similar (as far as we can tell). Despite them having worked together in the past, Powell wasn't in regular contact with Hitchcock.

As for the reasons behind the story and what it might have been based on, don't look just to Michael Powell but to the writer, Leo Marks. Leo first came to Micky with an idea for a story about Freud but then they found someone else was making one so they abandoned that.

The only production company interested in sponsoring the film is also a factor. Anglo-Amalgamated produced three British horror films which, because of their emphasis on sadism, cruelty and violence, with sexual overtones, were dubbed the "Sadian Trilogy" by film critic David Pirie. Horrors of the Black Museum (1959), Peeping Tom (1960) and Circus of Horrors (1960)

Leo came up with the original story of Peeping Tom. Micky liked the basic idea and they talked it through together to turn it into a script. It's hard to know exactly which parts are due to which person but in interviews Leo claimed to be an expert in fear having seen it in the eyes of all the SOE agents that he spoke to before they went off on their missions. Leo was also very interested in psychology and particularly in Freud.

There are points of similarity between Peeping Tom and Psycho. But there are also a lot of major differences

Steve

batman

The novel 'Psycho' was loosely based on the crimes of serial killer Ed Gein. This extract from the Wikipedia entry for Peeping Tom is quite interesting.

"Chris Rodley's documentary A Very British Psycho (1997) draws comparisons between Peeping Tom and Hitchcock's Psycho; the latter film was released in June 1960, only three months after Peeping Tom's premiere. Both films feature atypically mild-mannered serial killer protagonists who are emotionally obsessed with their parents. However, despite containing similarly disturbing material to Peeping Tom, Psycho became a box-office success and only increased the popularity and fame of its director. One reason suggested in the documentary is that Hitchcock, seeing the negative press reaction to Peeping Tom, decided to release Psycho without a press screening.[8]"

"Boom boom a baby .... Banham Zoo .... Banana pants! Hahahaha"

penfold

That would make sense....the reviews Peeping Tom got here were legendarily vituperative. I transcribed them for the PnP site a while back. The Killer Reviews

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

Steve Crook

All very true. Also, Hitchcock had the studios and major distributors behind him to help with the publicity. When they saw the reviews, Anglo-Amalgamated, who were only a small company, got scared and withdrew whatever little publicity they had planned. Peeping Tom wasn't so much released as trickled out.

Psycho had some good promotion gimmicks like not letting people in after it had started and the posters telling people not to reveal the ending.

Steve

Moor Larkin

Hmm. Yeah.

Browsing the internet most of the comparison points talk about voyeurism and so on. The similarity that suddenly struck me was more the 'plot resolution' mechanic of the 'monster' turning out to be a lost little child. I can recall this shocked me the first time I saw Psycho. I think that ending stayed with me more because Norman Bates did not die. The monster lived!.... Whereas the guy in Peeping Tom was neatly dealt with and I could go to bed that night, safe in the knowledge that the monster was dead.........

But both films had that 'shocking' reveal at the end that the 'monster' was just someone like I myself could have been. Wasn't that a huge plot development that was very new?

I mean, I wouldn't have seen either film for some years. I can recall Psycho and the shower scene being talked about at school but I had no idea about that final plot reveal until I watched it on TV, and that must have been some years later, but I still found it shocking then - more so than the famous shower scene I had heard so much about. I can also recall seeing Peeping Tom on TV. I had never heard of that film at all, but again although the stabbing was probably more horrid than the shower scene, the most shocking moments were when you realised what the father had been doing to the little boy, which was an analagous 'reveal' moment to the last scene in Psycho. (I thought the final death bits in peeping Tom were fairly disposable after that)

Assuming that I saw these movies in the late Sixties/early Seventies and these plot reveals still seemed unexpected, how cutting edge they must have been seven or ten years earlier! So what I'm wondering is, did some cutting edge psychological reports emerge in 1957-59 that sparked these so-similar plot devices..... like the Kinsey Reports got everyone excited for other reasons.

I've read the stuff about Leo Marks and S.O.E./Manchurian Candidate, but that all seems to be shooting off at tangents of mind control which seems a different beastie altogether. Neither Norman's mum nor Mark's dad meant to harm their children. They were both making terrible mistakes. It was the unintended cruelty that gave both plot devices their resonance..

Freud died in 1939 and my namesake Philip Larkin didn't write his famous verse about mum and dad until 1974, something must have cropped up in the Fifties to spark this synergy!

batman

The seminal book on psychopathy 'The Mask of Sanity' by Hervey Cleckley was first published in 1941 and was expanded for it's 1950 reprint. In it, the author laid out what he believed to be the characteristics of a 'psychopath' or 'sociopath' ....

1. Superficial charm and good intelligence
2. Absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking
3. Absence of nervousness or psychoneurotic manifestations
4. Unreliability
5. Untruthfulness and insincerity
6. Lack of remorse and shame
7. Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior
8. Poor judgment and failure to learn by experience
9. Pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love
10. General poverty in major affective reactions
11. Specific loss of insight
12. Unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations
13. Fantastic and uninviting behavior with drink and sometimes without
14. Suicide rarely carried out
15. Sex life impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated
16. Failure to follow any life plan

There wasn't really any other significant research until the 60s when another study came up with this, Hare's Three Factors ...

Factor1: Aggressive narcissism

1. Glibness/superficial charm
2. Grandiose sense of self-worth
3. Pathological lying
4. Conning/manipulative
5. Lack of remorse or guilt
6. Shallow affect
7. Callous/lack of empathy
8. Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
9. Promiscuous sexual behavior

Factor2: Socially deviant lifestyle

1. Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
2. Parasitic lifestyle
3. Poor behavioral control
4. Lack of realistic, long-term goals
5. Impulsively
6. Irresponsibility
7. Juvenile delinquency
8. Early behavior problems
9. Many short-term marital relationships
10. Revocation of conditional release

Traits not correlated with either factor

1. Many short-term marital relationships
2. Promiscuous sexual behavior
3. Criminal versatility

These factors were scored 0-2 and the higher your score the more likely you were to be a 'pure psychopath'.

As far as I am aware, apart from the ongoing research that still happens today, there was nothing 'sensational' that appeared in the late 50s. I will keep digging though.

"Boom boom a baby .... Banham Zoo .... Banana pants! Hahahaha"

Steve Crook

But in Peeping Tom, was Mark the monster? Or the victim? I think that PT leaves you much more with the feeling that given different circumstances you could be in his situation and also the uneasy feeling from the feedback loop" where you want to condemn him for looking at his victims, but you're looking at him doing it.

The first reveal in PT is revealed much earlier. We know what he's doing and that it's him doing it. But it looks like he might be saved by Helen. And Mark is such a nice lad, if slightly odd. It's hard not to feel some sympathy for him.

And the influence of Mark's father is a gradual reveal rather than the shock reveal of Norman's mother.

I'm not so sure that looking at Leo's history is all that much of a tangent.

But there is now so much that's been written about PT and Psycho and much of it is conflicting. They can't all be right. And some of them, even if they don't conflict with other people's ideas, are unlikely to be right

Steve