Just to add info to the discussion here is this very good
piece about all the reading levels of this major film, from
Roger Ebert found here:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19990502/REVIEWS08
/905020301/1023
...but there are also many other reviews in the IMDB site: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054167/externalreviews
Enjoy,
Montois
----------------------------
Peeping Tom (1960) Roger Ebert / May 2, 1999
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The movies make us into voyeurs. We sit in the dark, watching
other people's lives. It is the bargain the cinema strikes
with us, although most films are too well-behaved to mention
it.
Michael Powell's ``Peeping Tom,'' a 1960 movie about a man
who filmed his victims as they died, broke the rules and
crossed the line. It was so loathed on its first release that
it was pulled from theaters, and effectively ended the career
of one of Britain's greatest directors.
Why did critics and the public hate it so? I think because it
didn't allow the audience to lurk anonymously in the dark,
but implicated us in the voyeurism of the title
character.
Martin Scorsese once said that this movie, and Federico
Fellini's ``8 1/2,'' contain all that can be said about
directing. The Fellini film is about the world of deals and
scripts and show biz, and the Powell is about the deep
psychological process at work when a filmmaker tells his
actors to do as he commands, while he stands in the shadows
and watches.
Scorsese is Powell's most famous admirer. As a child, he
studied the films of ``the Archers''--the team of director
Powell and writer Emric Pressburger. Scorsese haunted the
late show screenings of their films, drinking in Powell's
bold images and confident, unexpected story
development.
Powell and Pressburger made some of the best and most
successful films of the 1940s and '50s, including ``The Life
and Death of Colonel Blimp,'' with Roger Livesey's great
performance spanning three wars; ``The Red Shoes,'' with
Moira Shearer as a ballet dancer; ``Black Narcissus,'' with
Deborah Kerr as a nun in the Himalayas, and ``Stairway to
Heaven,'' with David Niven as a dead airman. Then came
``Peeping Tom.''
It is a movie about looking. Its central character is a focus
puller at a British movie studio; his job is to tend the
camera, as an acolyte might assist at the mass. His secret
life involves filming women with a camera that has a knife
concealed in its tripod; as they realize their fate, he films
their faces, and watches the footage over and over in the
darkness of his rooms. He is working on a ``documentary,'' he
tells people, and only in the film's final shot do we realize
it is not only about his crimes, but about his death. He does
not spare himself the fate of his victims.
This man, named Mark Lewis, has been made into a pitiful
monster by his own upbringing. When Helen (Anna Massey), the
friendly girl who lives downstairs, shows an interest in his
work, he shows her films taken by his father. Films of Mark
as a little boy, awakened in the night by a flashlight in his
eyes. Films of his father dropping lizards onto his
bedclothes as he slept.
Tapes of his frightened cries. Mark's father, a psychologist
specializing in the subject of fear, used his son for his
experiments. When a police psychologist learns the story, he
muses, ``He has his father's eyes ... ''
There is more. We see little Mark filmed beside his mother's
dead body. Six weeks later, another film, as his father
remarries. (Wheels within wheels: The father is played by
Michael Powell. Mark's childhood home is the London house
where Powell was reared, and Mark as a child is played by
Powell's son.) At the wedding, Mark's father gives him a
camera as a present.
For Mark, the areas of sex, pain, fear and filmmaking are
connected. He identifies with his camera so much that when
Helen kisses him, he responds by kissing the lens of his
camera. When a policeman handles Mark's camera, Mark's hands
and eyes restlessly mirror the officer's moves, as if Mark's
body yearns for the camera and is governed by it. When Helen
tries to decide whether she should wear a piece of jewelry on
the shoulder or at the neckline, Mark's hands touch his own
body in the same places, as if he is a camera, recording her
gestures.
Powell originally thought to cast Laurence Harvey in the
lead, but he settled instead on Karl Boehm, an Austrian actor
with such a slight accent in English that it sounds more like
diffidence. Boehm was blond, handsome, soft and tentative;
Powell was interested to learn that his new star was the son
of the famous symphony conductor. He might know something of
overbearing fathers.
Boehm's performance creates a vicious killer, who is shy and
wounded. The movie despises him, yet sympathizes with him. He
is a very lonely man.
He lives upstairs in a rooming house. The first room is
conventional, with a table, a bed, a kitchen area. The second
room is like a mad scientist's laboratory, with cameras and
film equipment, a laboratory, a screening area, obscure
equipment hanging from the ceiling.
Helen is startled when he reveals that the house is his
childhood home, and he is the landlord: ``You? But you walk
around as if you can't afford the rent.'' Helen lives with
her mother (Maxine Audley), who is alcoholic and blind, and
listens to Mark's footsteps. When Helen tells her mother
they're going out together, her mother says, ``I don't trust
a man who walks so softly.'' Later Mark surprises the mother
inside his inner room, and she cuts right to the heart of his
secret: ``I visit this room every night. The blind always
visit the rooms they live under. What am I seeing,
Mark?''
Powell's film was released just months before ``Psycho,''
another shocking film by a British director. Hitchcock's film
arguably had even more depraved subject matter than Powell's,
and yet it was a boost for his career, perhaps because
audiences expected the macabre from Hitchcock but Powell was
more identified with elegant and stylized films.
There is a major sequence in ``Peeping Tom'' that Hitchcock
might have envied. After hours at the film studio, Mark
persuades an extra (Moira Shearer) to stay behind so he can
film her dancing. She is almost giddy to have her own solo
shots, and dances around a set and even into a big blue
trunk. The next day, the body is discovered inside the
trunk--while Mark, unseen, films the discovery.
The film's visual strategies implicate the audience in Mark's
voyeurism. The opening shot is through Mark's viewfinder.
Later, we see the same footage in Mark's screening room, in a
remarkable shot from behind Mark's head. As the camera pulls
back, the image on the screen moves in for a closeup, so the
face of the victim effectively remains the same size as
Mark's head shrinks. In one shot, Powell shows us a member of
the audience being diminished by the power of the cinematic
vision. Other movies let us enjoy voyeurism; this one
extracts a price.
Powell (1905-1990) was a director who loved rich colors, and
``Peeping Tom'' is shot in a saturated Technicolor with shots
such as one where a victim's body under a bright red blanket
stands out against the gray street. He was a virtuoso of
camera use, and in ``Peeping Tom'' the basic strategy is to
always suggest that we are not just seeing, but looking. His
film is a masterpiece precisely because it doesn't let us off
the hook, like all of those silly teenage slasher movies do.
We cannot laugh and keep our distance: We are forced to
acknowledge that we watch, horrified but fascinated.
. . .
``Peeping Tom'' essentially finished Powell's career,
although he made more films. By the late 1970s, however,
Scorsese was sponsoring revivals and restorations, and joined
Powell on the audio commentary tracks of several laser discs.
Indeed, Powell and Scorsese's editor, Thelma Schoonmaker,
fell in love and married, and she assisted him in writing the
most remarkable directorial autobiographies, A Life in Movies
and Million-Dollar Movie.
On 10/10/07 6:43 AM, "Juri Nummelin" <
juri.nummelin@pp.inet.fi> wrote:
> It's not twisted. I cried after I'd watched it and
went to my family to seek
> solace.
>
> Juri
> (who has seen it at least four times, twice on big
screen, and who admits
> there are some stale scenes throughout the film, but
the best scenes rule
> out the worst ones; Danny O'Peary discusses the film
in some depth in his
> CULT MOVIES and points out for example that Powell
himself plays Mark
> Lewis's father in the old home movies and that Mark
Lewis is quite close to
> Leo Marks, the screenwriter's own name, so it's
personal at many levels)
>
>
>
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