FLUSHED DOWN A SEWER
If you've never heard of nor seen Michael Powell's 1960 masterpiece "Peeping Tom" you may want to lend me a bit of your attention for a moment.
Like I "said" above, it's 1960 and …There's this shy, kind young man (Karl Boehm) who works as a focus puller at a London movie studio spends his off hours stalking women, and filming their death agonies. Precisely how he kills them is an unsettling surprise, but the why is even more intriguing, for it explores the psychologies of fear and voyeurism; the latter, of course, is at the core of the moviegoing experience, so we become unavoidably complicit in the killer’s morbid urge to look. Perfectly fascinating thriller is unsettling from the first moment, as the hushed whir of a camera is accompanied by a viewfinder’s framing of a streetwalker, who will be the film’s first victim. So it is that we are made into accomplices from the very start. That essential uneasiness never lets up.
"Do you know what the most frightening thing in the world is? It's fear."
Very carefully directed by Powell (Black Narcissus; The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp; A Matter of Life and Death; The Red Shoes), and shot in supersaturated color that makes everyone look unhealthy instead of robust. Boehm is perfectly brilliant; fine work also by Anna Massey, as a young neighbor who strikes up an innocent romance with the killer, and who asks him to take the pictures for her children’s book about a “magic camera.” Maxine Audley is excellent as the girl’s blind mother, who “sees” the young man more clearly than anyone. Amusing support by Shirley Ann Field, as a brain-dead movie starlet; and legendary British pin-up model Pamela Green, as--a pin-up model! British trade reviewers appreciated the film’s craft and commercial potential, but mainstream reviewers savaged it; one said that it should be “flushed down a sewer.”
It's worth noting that the film did virtually no business in Britain, nearly wrecked Powell’s career, and was not seen in the U.S. for two years, and in truncated form, at that. Martin Scorsese began to champion Peeping Tom in the late seventies, and has subsequently overseen uncensored video/DVD reissues.
