PEEPING TOM
Fifty years or more have transpired since Michael Powell shocked his way out of a professional film making career.
His decline and subsequent meagre filming life in Australia came as a direct result of both public and critical revulsion to this mass stabbing epic of voyeurism.
It’s cult status now as a movie which intentionally flaunts a lurid, shocking sleaziness is guaranteed.
In the early 1960’s in the U.K. the mood of the hostile reviewers and panicky distributors was in uproar. The disturbing enough by having a mentally ill murderer as its subject , but it very slyly becomes even more so by involving the audience in the action. The killer Mark (Carl Boehm) has a fetish-like fascination with the movie camera, and he likes to preserve the purest moment of fear by filming his victims as he murders them.
The directors influence by Freud is apparent in the entire film made in a psychological code, filled with clues and imagery.
The actual film does lag a little .after its lethally macabre and brilliant opening scenes…but if anything deserves the “dark masterpiece” tag, this does: a brilliant satirical insight into the neurotic, pornographic element in the act of filming, more relevant than ever in the age of reality television and CCTV.
The continuing use or Moira Shearer (The Red Shoes) as a dancer that also meets her end by the killer’s tripod with it’s blade like secret weapon sharpened to penetrate the most beautiful of necks….and the Germanic sounding anti-hero only served to alienate the uneducated bastion of amateur critics at the time ,that were spoon-fed by the elite control of the U.K.’s film establishment.
The voyeurism,scopophilia and visual content of “Peeping Tom” were a measured artistic development in Michael Powell’s directional aims. He craved the controversy he knew would come .
However this reviewer is left with a feeling of ‘What if ?’ ….. with his understanding of the scientific gaze in the cinema from real life, as Michel Foucault acknowledges ,is at the heart of the advancement of knowledge in Western culture…then what other masterpieces would he have conjured up for us to view and drool over for decades.
A film and repercussion review of Peeping Tom by Tim Francis.
