Peeping Tom: Special Edition (Exclusive Introduction By Martin Scorsese)

The daddy of all serial killer films and the most intelligent is a technicolor nightmare full of dark deep focus fantasies. Powell was vilified for taking on such disturbing material, but he had tapped into the grubby underbelly of a Great Britain just emerging from post-war poverty and into a bright consumer world, gaudily represented by the corner shop in which Mark films Paris Hilton lookalike Milly for under the counter soft porn.
In fact Powell and screenwriter Leo Marks predicted the dark side of the 60s and its relationship with sex and celebrity. In a couple of short years the Profumo affair would shock the nation and by the end of the decade revelations from the Krays' convictions would further repel and fascinate it in equal measure.
The softly spoken Mark is a classic British eccentric; bullied by his father, socially inept, and fanatical about his work/hobby, he stalks his female prey looking for the ultimate look of fear from his victims. His father used him in his twisted academic experiments but is Mark really trying to find his dead mother's final expression and in it some connection with her? Or is he punishing his victims for her failure to protect him as a child?
Mark's dedication to cinema in the dawn of the television age is another interesting theme developed by Powell. A producer at Mark's studio announces that all directors are to cut back on takes to save money. Powell immediately cuts to the director of the aptly named feature, "The Walls Are Closing In" who cranks up an astonishing amount of footage. It is this classic clash of business and art in cinema that drives Mark as much as anything else. He is more akin to his director than his producer but identifies more with the French New Wave and their techniques, especially the long take that introduces the film.
Powell shows television what it can't do by his heavily stylized use of mise-en-scene especially his masterful manipulation of colour. Mark's room is both sinister and sorrowful, Tardis in size it is his safe haven and his death trap. As soon as he opens his room and thus his life to Helen he is doomed. In many ways this relationship matches Powell's with Britain after Peeping Tom was released. He opens his real feelings about cinema and we killed him for it.

It's hard to believe that this is from Michael Powell (of Powell and Pressburger) the maker of such classic old films as "The Red Shoes", "Life and Death of Colonel Blimp", "Black Narcissus" "A Matter of Life and Death" and "Battle of the River Plate". The story and screenplay is by Leo Marks who had recently worked with and was recommended by Danny Angel (producer of "Carve her Name with Pride"). He'd asked Powell "How would you like to make a film about a young man with a camera who kills the woman that he photographs?" and the story developed from that.

Starring Anna Massey, Maxine Audley, Moira Shearer and Carl Boehm, "Peeping Tom" was released before Hitchcock's "Psycho" and its perceived porno connotations put an end to Powell's GB film making career - he went to Australia to see out his days. I have never seen so many contemporaray nasty terms used to describe a film. The pious and probably hypocritical critics acting as the self-appointed moral majority absolutely panned it, using such phrases as "I am sickened", "sadism, sex and the exploitation of human degradation", "this beastly picture", "not even the hopeless East Pakistan leper colonies, the back streets of Bombay or the gutters of Calcutta has left me with such a feeling of nausea and depression as I got sitting through this film", "it should be flushed down the toilet", "salacious, rapacious and utterly boring", "a prostitution of the arts", "an insult to the film business". One wretch even went so far as to say that Powell displayed his vulgarity in "A Matter of Life and Death" and "The Red Shoes". This is all strong stuff indeed from the ignorant, arrogant people who, like the censor, would impose their morals and views on us all if they could.

Despite these pathetically blinkered views (even for 1960), it's a fine film, shot in the glorious Eastman colour of the time. A nice introduction by Martin Scorsese sums the film and position up. A case quote sums the film itself up even better though "One of the first and still one of the best cinematic journeys into the mind of a psychopath". Powell's son plays an uncredited role as main character Mark Lewis as a young boy (with Powell as his sadistic father).

Basically focus puller and part-time porno photographer Mark Lewis kills women with a camera on a doctored tripod, fitted with a knife and mirror so he can film their faces as he kills them and they can see their reflected faces as they die (nicely OTT for the moral majority of 1960).

My only criticism of this film, which is credited with influencing the likes of "Repulsion", "Blow Out" and "One from the Heart", is that it suffers from a rather poor ending.

The film comes not only with an informative 24 page booklet but a good few extras like documentaries and a commentary.

Of all the things to have influenced me to seek out this film, it was it's passing mention in one of the sequences of Scream 4 when Ghostface is questioning a future victim and observes it was the first film to put the audience into the killer's POV. Thus when I saw it for a fiver I my curiousity was piqued and I bought it.

Directed in late 1959 and released in 1960, director Michael Powell's voyeuristic horror and commentary on a hundred and one things (including but not limited to cinema itself, British hypocrisy, sex, the Rank film Organisation - yep, really) centres on a young man who works as a focus puller for a film studio by day, but who also photographs soft porn photo shoots for under the counter magazines etc in seedy Soho. In his spare time, however he also murders young women and films the act of their murder for him to replay later at home. As he becomes involved with a young woman and her mother in his building, and as his murders begin to attract the attention of the police, soon the net closes in on his activities.

Reviled - basically that's the best word for it - on release and effectively ending the directorial career of Powell it's one of those films that has found it's place and importance in the cinematic landscape through years of reappraisal and re-evaluation and is now regarded as an important film not just of the genre but also of Powell's career. Featuring great performances and one of the most tension building and disturbing pre-kill sequences that even I've seen in many years this is a fantastic piece of cinema that leaves many conversation options in it's wake.

The extras package is good, with a commentary, a couple of featurettes (one conducted in French with subtitles), a glosy booklet of interviews and an introduction from one of the film's biggest fans, Martin Scorcese rounding out the package. The film itself however, must be seen by fans of cinema for it's content and clear influences on many later film-makers.