Michael Powell did live long enough to see the reputation of this artfully disturbing story rise like the reanimated but skewered remains of the far-too-likable-and-lovely-to-kill, Moira Shearer, Peeping Tom’s third murderee. He never saw Rotten Tomatoes which has the film ranked at 96% - 2% ahead of Avengers Endgame and level with Black Panther – but his art transcends their populist appeal and I'm pretty sure Stan Lee would agree. This is a film you can watch over and again, still finding new details, new meanings and cinematic resonance and I'm delighted that the BFI allowed us to view it on the big screen.
Tom, as Powell obsessives do not call it, was being
screened as part of the new Edgar Wright curated season of London films and
others that influenced his latest retro fun-pack Last Night In Soho, including Beat Girl, Sammy
Lee and Primitive London. Peeping Tom shares those film’s
fascination with the sleezy side of old Soho and even features Pamela Green who
my Uncle Harry assures me was the sexual superpower of late 50s/early 60s Dad’s
mags and “art films” such the saucy travelogue Naked as Nature Intended (1961) and who also made films
for the deaf along with George Harrison Marks her partner and director. Pam plays Milly
the model and adds authentic glamour in some outrageous flimsy lingerie and is
thoroughly believable as the bored model waiting to be clicked at.
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| Carl Boehm: Mark is a camera |
Retro porn is of course "perfectly harmless"… but Powell
has a deeper point to make (literally, etc.) given that his tripod-wielding murderer,
Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) is obsessed with documenting fear in the most coldly
calculating way after being brought up by a father (played, of course, by Michael
Powell himself) who experimented on him and recorded the results on film and
tape. There’s a comment here on the nature of filmmaking and also the obsessive-compulsive
collation of experience in a manner that is now commonplace thanks to mobile
phones and social media. We’re all of us “Peeping Toms” now, recording content
every day and sharing it good or bad… are we reduced as the subject and is our
capacity to just experience hindered by our urge to collect and collate?
Powell clearly had in mind the driving force of directors
like Hitchcock and not excluding himself, who were drawn to the extremes of
human behaviour not to mention the audience that enable their films through
watching. Hitchcock made voyeurs of us all and his P.O.V. killer Psycho was
released mere weeks after Tom… Powell was also worldly enough to not
sensationalise but send up the burgeoning sex industry just as much as he does
the film industry here.
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| Pamela Brown as Milly the Model |
Powell’s casting of Carl Boehm is crucial to the film’s
strangeness with the German actor not looking or sounding English but rather something alien much like the character in Paul Auster’s City of Glass, Peter Stillman, whose father
kept him in isolation as a child expecting him to emerge speaking the one true
language. Mark has been thoroughly twisted by his upbringing and the film opens
with his murder of a prostitute called Dora (Brenda Bruce) in Newman Passage,
Fitzrovia, which he films before, during and after as the Police arrive to
investigate. Dora’s face is shown as he thrusts the blade hidden in his camera
tripod and it’s the most unpleasant of deaths even compared to the modern “slasher”
films supposedly influenced by this film.
Mark has a side-line in taking dirty pictures – in the
old vernacular – over a newsagents on the corner of Rathbone Street and Percy
Street, Bloomsbury, which sells soft porn as well as under-the-counter “views”
if the dirty raincoat brigade are brave enough to ask for them – there’s a
lovely cameo from Miles Malleson as “Elderly gentleman customer”, one of a
number of humorous episodes that lighten the film and offer you sweet before
the sour.
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| The uneasy lensman oozing queasy need |
He has a session there with Milly who introduces a new
model, Lorraine (Susan Travers) who has a disfigured upper lip which
immediately makes Mark very sweaty… he’s a creep, he’s a weirdo and I know
exactly what the hell he’s doing there.
Powell is typically counter-intuitive, selecting the right players for his characters and Anna Massey is arguably more important that Boehm as Helen, who lodges on the ground floor of the house Mark has inherited. Massey’s a great technician – I once saw her imperious as Queen Elizabeth to Isabelle Huppert’s Mary in Schiller’s Mary Stuart at the National, darling - and she gets through a lot of the emotional narrative as the wholesome, determinedly faithful Helen who only sees the best in her painfully shy new friend. She’s the one who will be left to find Mark guilty but with extenuating circumstances, understanding the painful reality of his situation in ways the police, good as they are, won’t comprehend. Helen experiences the horror in the same way as the audience in a typical thriller, we know from the start that Mark is the killer but she must find his bloodied dark side through his innocence.
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| Anna Massey arrives bearing cake |
Mark’s social interactions are painful to watch as he
first meets Helen as she greets him on the stairs outside her 21st
birthday party, he’s the shyest of serial killers but she only sees his
vulnerabilities and fascinated by his innocence and creativity wants to know
more about the “documentary” he is working on. There’s a strong cameo from Maxine
Audley as Helen’s mother, she is blind – therefore incapable of being another
Peeping Tom – but hears more than other’s see and is always suspicious of the
man she can hear moving around on the floor above in his dark room.
Mark’s main job is as a focus puller at a film studio and
this is where the film adds some slapstick, at least initially… Esmond Knight is Arthur Baden, a director of nervous
disposition who is exasperated by his young star Diane Ashley (Shirley Anne
Field - also in Beat Girl!) and her inability to faint just as he wants her, there’s take after take
until she collapses from exhaustion and that’s the shot. Any relation to
Director Alfred is probably accidental.
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| Vivian/Vicky/Victoria - Moira Shearer gets ready for her close up... |
Diane’s double is Vivian played with cheerful ethereality
by prima ballerina Moira Shearer, Vicky/Victoria in The Red Shoes and, here
again, thank you Mr Powell, we do get to see her dance for a little while at
least. This is one of several self-referential points in the film and to see a “character”
from the Powell extended universe, an earlier more earnest one, throws the horrors
of this film into sharper relief. Vicky dies for her art in her film whilst
Vivian – all light and joy – is despatched as a meaningless bit player in Mark’s
greater scheme, she even gets left on the cutting room floor as the death isn’t
captured well enough to meet his vision. So, he goes in search of another
victim…
The police are now involved, with Chief Insp. Gregg (Jack Watson) and Det. Sgt. Miller (Nigel Davenport) assigned to Vivian’s case, and the dots start to connect around Mark. It’s all as he planned though, part of a greater picture of which even he is a player to be sacrificed in the name of film.
There’s endless fun to be had with pulling out the hidden
meaning Powell smuggles into the film, as always, and whilst the film has been
described as “horror” it’s rather more than a thriller which is why it has
outlasted the opinion of the contemporary critics. For me it’s far less
obnoxious than Psycho and once you accept it as a kind of very high comedy the action
leads to self-examination as much as revulsion with the director keeping the violence
as much in our minds as on screen.
Very pleased to have seen this on screen so thankyou BFI
as always and for this season of seedy Soho swinging… next up, Beat Girl and in 35mm!.
Miles Malleson asks for the latest issue of Sight and Sound...
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