batman

I have always thought of Psycho as a psychological thriller with dark comedic undertones.

Steve Crook

The trouble is the extreme point of view from the other side. From the fan of what is nowadays dubbed the "horror genre". Which means all the people that have grown up watching Friday the Thirteenth (part 256 or whatever it is they're up to), A Nightmare on Elm Street and similar films. They think that anything with a serial killer, or even anything with a single killing, should be put into the same "modern horror" genre.

I've come across it quite often with people that run "horror" fan sites (full of Jason & Freddie pictures) who want to include Peeping Tom in the same set.

Maybe they do only watch Peeping Tom for the killings - and so miss the vast majority of the point of it

Steve

batman

Psycho is nearer to a modern day 'slasher' film simply because we see the killings, but it has much more to offer than slayings and creepy camera angles, which seems to be what 'slasher' films thrive on. It is more of a thriller than PT because, as you said, in PT we know 'whodunnit'.

I would call neither film, especially PT, a horror film because they are both character, rather than situation driven, and are more concerned with the relationships of the perpetrators than the gruesome consequences of their actions.

Psychological drama is the best description for PT that I can think of.

Thank goodness it doesn't have any monsters or witches in it.


ps - I cannot understand why AW called PT a 'snuff' movie (if such things actually exist).

Steve Crook

Because he is (or was) a plonker

For his first review (Evening Standard; 7th April 1960) he said:
If a Peeping Tom is to be the hero of a film, then what makes Tom peep ought to shed a humane and useful ray of understanding on what makes Tom, Dick and Harry peep.
For a morbid desire to gaze is one of the commonest obsessions in life.
Unfortunately, Michael Powell's new film is just a clever but corrupt and empty exercise in shock tactics which displays a nervous fascination with the perversion it illustrates.
Played by Austria's Carl Boehm, Peeping Tom is a cameraman in a film studio who not only peeps but kills - stabbing women, among them Moira Shearer as a stand-in, with his cine-camera's sharpened tripod.
He then films the fear in their faces as they die - a nightmarish notion which Leo Marks's overwrought screenplay trumps with an even more grotesque motive.
For Tom, it seems, is out to excel father, whose experiments in fear stopped short of murder - but let him use his son as a guinea-pig to be frightened out of sleep with lizards in the bedclothes.
Even brilliant colour photography by Otto Heller cannot reconcile me to a film as this.
It exploits fears and inhibitions for the lowest motives. It trades in the self-same kind of obsession that it relates.

Then he was interviewed in the documentary A Very British Psycho (1997) which is on the Criterion and Institut Lumière DVDs. In that interview he said he stood by his 1960 review and that's when he called it a "snuff film" - and he wasn't talking about finely chopped tobacco

Quite a few of the other reviewers who gave those initial scathing, way over the top, reviews had recanted in the interim period. Sunday Times film critic Dilys Powell (no relation) went so far as to publish a letter of apology to Michael Powell. Shame she only thought to do it 4 years after he had died.

Steve

m35541

Whilst I think Walker's description of Peeping Tom as a "snuff movie" is ludicrous (and probably just made to be controversial/attention-seeking on the DVD) I have a lot more respect for him for keeping to his original opinion than I do for Dilys Powell who seemed to just change her viewpoint to mirror whatever the current critical consensus of the film is in a particular time period.

The Peeping Tom reviews on the P&P website are pretty hilarious and well worth reading as well as being full of errors/inconsistencies. I'd like to see the ones on Curse of Frankenstein (i believe Lejeune and Hill went ballistic at that too) or Stranglers of Bombay.

It reminds me of the time when Michael Parkinson took over from Barry Norman On Film 80 something for a few weeks and went nuclear upon viewing Paul Verhoeven's Flesh and Blood.

Steve Crook

One of the funniest of the Peeping Tom reviews is the one that talks about the use of "heavy orchestral music to whip up a debased atmosphere". Apart from when Viv is playing her taped jazz music or there's other "heard" music like at Helen's party, all the soundtrack is just on a single piano.

I think that in this case Dilys Powell did reconsider her 1960 review and realise that she'd got it badly wrong. It could well have been other people praising it that made her look at it again but I don't think she was just going with popular opinion. It was still fairly hard to see it when she wrote her recantation in 1994.

Steve

m35541

It was still fairly hard to see it when she wrote her recantation in 1994.

It got released on video that year so that may have prompted her recantation. It had definitely played on TV before then as I first saw it on TV.

On the reviews front I note one of them complains about veteran character actor Miles Malleson "letting his standards drop" by appearing in the film - presumably forgetting that Malleson had appeared in Hammer's Dracula a couple of years before.

The MFB review by David Robinson seems to assume his readership have an intricate knowledge of the writings of De Sade. Rather than state why he thinks PT is a Sadean movie he just refers you to the relevant chapters in the books without any explanation as to their content. This says more about him (and possibly subscribers to the MFB) than it does about PT.

Mind you, errors/inconsistencies in newspaper critics reviews are not uncommon. And sometimes they haven't even seen the film.

Steve Crook

Leo Marks said they saw it quite early in the day, so some of them were even sober

Steve

charliekane

If it helps, Michael Powell told The Times that he had several other projects in preparation at the time, but 'this was the one the companies wanted to finance...I tried to go beyond the ordinary horror film of unexplained monsters, and instead to show why one human being should behave in this extraordinary way - it's a story of a human being first and foremost.'

Can't quite lay my hands on the cutting at the moment, but I seem to remember the Times headline to the piece was along the lines of 'Mr Powell makes a Horror Film.'

moonfleet

Although great french director Bertrand Tavernier said that "Peeping Tom" was "destroyed" by british cine-critics in its time, as for any artist it must have been hard times for Michael Powell....
M.

"Very difficult !" "Craazy!"