Michael Powell and Leo Marks encode their tale of a sick serial killer with 1001 wicked observations, insights and unflattering jokes about everything cinematic, emphasizing voyeuristic excess and obsession. Carl Boehm’s protagonist is a ‘very British Psycho’ who conducts his murderous crusade like an explorer in taboo territory, and fetishizes his cameras as sexual objects. Enraged Brit film critics demolished the film’s release, ending Powell’s stellar career; 20 years later, Martin Scorsese led the charge to rescue the director’s reputation. The extras extend the film’s meaning and context in several fascinating directions. An outstanding disc.

Peeping Tom 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 58
1960 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 101 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date May 14, 2024 / 49.95
Starring: Carl Boehm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley, Brenda Bruce, Miles Malleson, Esmond Knight, Martin Miller, Michael Goodliffe, Jack Watson, Shirley Anne Field, Pamela Green, Nigel Davenport, Columba Powell, Michael Powell, Susan Travers.
Cinematography: Otto Heller
Art Director: Arthur Lawson
Film Editor: Noreen Ackland
Original Music: Brian Easdale, Wally Stott
Original Story and Screenplay by Leo Marks
Produced and Directed by Michael Powell

We first saw Peeping Tom at the UCLA film school in 1973 or so, when associate professor Bob Epstein screened a dodgy collector’s copy, asking his 200 students to ‘stay mum about it.’  The print was mostly magenta but it still took our heads off: we were blown away to discover that an older feature could be so cinema-aware, so self-reflexive. The film deconstructs the psychological act of watching a movie, wa-ay before such musings became brain exercises for film theorists.

“Take me to your cinema…

We had barely heard of the 1960 movie, which when new had received an overwhelmingly negative critical outcry in the English press. The critical protest was so loud and virulent, it was pulled from London theaters after just a few days. A U.S. release in adult theaters attracted little attention; it became a rare item soon thereafter.

The ‘auteur’ of the notorious Peeping Tom was none other than Michael Powell, the great cinema artisan of  Black Narcissus and  The Red Shoes. After his celebrated partnership with Emeric Pressburger ended, Powell seems to have been inspired to make a radical — but commercial — film that would take people’s heads off. Peeping Tom instead brought his career to a standstill. The powerful London critical establishment rejected him completely, with damning reviews that became legendary. Powell cheerfully read our favorite out loud in a documentary film: “… we haven’t seen anything this repulsive since last year’s The Stranglers of Bombay!”

 

The banishment was nearly total until around 1980, when the newly-empowered Martin Scorsese and his editor-collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker flexed their newfound cultural influence to re-introduce and promote the film legacy of director Michael Powell. Seeing the Peeping Tom reissue (at the much-missed Encore theater) was an eye-opening experience. In full Eastmancolor, Otto Heller’s cinematography casts a lurid psychological spell … enough to convince anyone that the ‘trashy film that played in nudie theaters’ is a masterpiece.

A teaming of two mad geniuses.

Michael Powell’s didn’t conceive of Peeping Tom on his own. His new collaborator Leo Marks was one very unique individual, a genius ex-codebreaker who lived long enough to tell his incredible, tragic wartime story in a 2001 book, Between Silk and Cyanide. Marks makes a strong impression, both in print and in person in Criterion’s archival interviews.

Marks and Powell begin their show with a bravura subjective sequence, the murder of a sex worker (Brenda Bruce) filmed from the point of view of the killer, or more accurately, through the viewfinder of the killer’s movie camera. We then meet Mark Lewis (Karl Boehm or Karlheinz Böhm), a camera assistant in a film studio. An introverted loner, Mark moonlights after hours shooting nudie stills for a smut peddler. He also pursues a horrible obsession, filming women being murdered … while he is murdering them.

Despite his shyness, Mark allows himself to be drawn into a chaste friendship with the nice young woman downstairs in his rooming house, Helen (Anna Massey, the hapless potato victim in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy). Mark responds to Helen’s unguarded positivity, which offers hope that he might be cured. It seems Mark was the childhood guinea pig of a scientist father who used him in cruel, mind-warping experiments, ‘research’ that continues in Mark’s atrocious crimes. His potential victims are Vivian, an aspiring dancer (Moira Shearer of The Red Shoes), and Milly (Pamela Green), his model for adult photographic ‘views’ sold under the counter.

Mark comes partly out of his shell for Helen, and accepts her honest curiosity. But Helen’s blind mother (Maxine Audley of  The Prince and the Showgirl &  The Vikings) perceives that something’s not right with their upstairs neighbor with the photo lab in the attic. Mrs. Stephens near-clairvoyant abilities disturb him, as does her inability to see. Can she tell what he is thinking?

 

“The silly bitch! She’s fainted in the wrong scene!”

Peeping Tom is constructed of elements recognizable from future Giallos and Slasher films, but presented with a reserve that is both intelligent and intimidating. Powell and Marks were careful not to provoke the British censors, who were already clamping down on the excesses of Hammer Films. We see no blood and none of the explicit on-screen violence of the same year’s smash success  Psycho. The film instead constructs a clever maze of clues, allusions, jokes, and visual references, all around the subject of movies, photography, cameras, and just seeing.  To play a hack film director, Michael Powell chose his old friend actor Esmond Knight … who was nearly blind, from a wartime injury. Powell himself plays Mark Lewis’s scientist father, seen only in home movies. The in-jokes are not scattershot, but tightly organized around the central theme. When she appears in gaudy lingerie for a nude shoot, Milly name-drops Britain’s elite costume designer, Cecil Beaton.

This most intelligent film about film is much more than a Horror thriller. Michael Powell’s earlier films often challenged English attitudes and assumptions. Here he investigates the relationship between cinema and voyeurism, between screen fantasies and our secret desires. Peeping Tom teases the passive/active component of Film as Fantasy. Some say that Powell was crucified for making a perverse movie, when what he did was deliver the unwelcome but obvious truth that movie-watching makes us all Peeping Toms. Of course film critics were offended — their gate-keeper function is to promote ‘the cinema’ as fine art and worthy entertainment.

 

Op-ed journalists concerned with England’s image saw little reason to come to Michael Powell’s rescue. In their view Peeping Tom makes London look like a hive of depravity. The unflattering tour shows us a nudie photography studio, and a tacky ‘newsagents’ shop with nude postcards on display. A neighborhood girl buys candy next to an old perv looking at pornography. The first murder takes place in a claustrophobic, damp brick alley unchanged since the reign of Jack the Ripper. Where are the authorities?  Mark Lewis is able to film the aftermath of his own sordid crime by identifying himself as a member of the press:  “What paper am I from?  Oh. The Observer.”  There is no heroic character, no healthy ‘John Gavin’ alternative to the loathsome Mark, who skulks about staring through windows like an old Universal monster or The Horrible Dr. Hichcock.    What could possibly have made the image-conscious London press more defensive?

A very polite, very civilized monster.

The Channel 4 U.K. documentary A Very British Psycho is laden with insights and inspirations that center on the screenwriter Leo Marks. His background as a top WWII codebreaker informs Peeping Tom but also a beautiful poem and the backstory of Helene Hanff’s very non-horror book and movie  84 Charing Cross Road. In his unenviable wartime role, Marks sent agents to occupied France and Holland, armed with spy codes of his own invention. The brave agents could live or die depending on how well he did his job.

Leo Marks took this morbid relationship with Death to heart: to function effectively and responsibly, he couldn’t allow himself to invest emotionally in his agents’ fates. In Peeping Tom he connects with the borderline callous / ruthless attitude that was required. For his ‘namesake’ Mark Lewis, the inhuman half of the equation has taken over. In his twisted quest for an un-filmable image Lewis has alienated himself from the human race, and become an unfeeling monster.

We’ve seen one other Leo Marks movie that references his wartime crisis of despair and ruthlessness. Marks put a lot of his personality into the screenplay for Hammer Films’ 1951  Cloudburst, directed by Francis Searle. The hero is a codebreaker whose wife was tortured by the enemy, and who carries out a grotesque postwar vengeance. It’s almost like a Paul Schrader picture — we can sense Marks attempting to exorcise his personal demons.

 

We’re ALL Peeping Toms on this bus.

The parade of veiled jokes and sex allusions never lets up. Marks and Powell gleefully equate cameras with voyeurism, which expert Laura Mulvey tells us has a direct connection to sadism. The main character exercises a serious fetish for his 16mm Bell & Howell ‘Filmo,’ even expressing an oral fixation with its longest lens … we kid you not. The ‘other’ function of Mark’s filmmaking/killing apparatus is obvious. Without his camera he is impotent, and he’s adapted its tripod to serve as a weapon. Horror criticism of the 1970s is filled with interpretations of blade-wielding killers that ‘violate’ women for sexual fulfillment. Powell and Marks beat them to the punch by a good ten years.

We know from the start that Mark is a killer, but Powell witholds his exact method until the climax. A flashing light seen in early attacks is ultimately reveale d to be reflected from a parabolic mirror: Mark forces his victims to see themselves as they die. The payoff shot displays a distorted, expressionistic image of the victim’s face, as in a funhouse mirror.  ↓  The image relates to a murder scene in a famous Hitchcock classic, reflected in a close-up of a pair of eyeglasses. We may also be reminded of John Frankenheimer’s eerie use of warped mirrors to create a mind-bending effect. Poor Mark Lewis — the twisted image in his parabolic mirror might be the ‘ultimate expression of fear’ he sought and failed to achieve.

 

We once again film-check Riccardo Freda’s gothic The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, which depicts a paralyzing fright that warps a victim’s point of view. The doctor’s ‘obscene rapture’ is visualized through his impossibly bloated, distorted face.  Freda’s shocking spectacle is excused as a subjective drug hallucination; Powell’s horror reflection is cold and mechanical camera optics.

Peeping Tom’s stylized color scheme and lighting elicit specific psychological reactions; one can often feel the atmosphere. Otto Heller uses darkness well — Anna Massey’s Helen rises into a shadowy close-up as she tries to understand some unseen but surely unspeakable projected image. The watery highlights in her eyes show her growing terror. The red photographic lights in Mark’s attic lair motivate the red glow around Helen’s hair. Red lamps are present at the murder scenes, and Mark is never too far from something red, even if only an out-of-focus object in the background.

 

Michael Powell wrote that Karl Boehm took his role very seriously. The German leading man had risen to continental stardom opposite Romy Schneider in the Sissi movies, and his Mark Lewis retains a boyish gentility even with a whispered voice that reminds us of Peter Lorre. This is most evident when Mark beholds a model (Susan Travers) with a facial deformity. He’s enraptured, just like Lorre’s Dr. Gogol in the horror classic Mad Love.

Boehm’s performance makes use of odd tics that signal behavorial maladjustment. Some of his gestures resemble the ‘tactile’ acting in vintage German Expressionist films. Mark mimics Helen’s actions, as if yearning to touch her; he clutches his heart in a way similar to Brigitte Helm in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Women might not find Mark’s soft voice and manner effeminate, but many men would. The cops just dismiss him as an all-around non-threat.

 

I am a camera.

Anna Massey is an inspired choice for Helen, the fresh-faced girl next door who distracts Mark from his obsession with cameras and images. She manages to get him to leave his camera behind, even if he keeps reaching for it when he encounters couples kissing in the dark. Helen asks Mark about photos needed for a children’s book she’s written, images that are supposed to come from a Magic Camera. Mark responds like a 6 year-old offered ice cream. Helen’s benign influence seems an escape from his father’s twisted resesarch, a path to a cure.

This new remaster of Michael Powell’s film begins with an Anglo-Amalgamated logo, reminding us that genre critic David Pirie classified Peeping Tom as part of an ‘Anglo-Amalgamated Sadism Trilogy.’  The other two sides of the triangle are Arthur Crabtree’s tawdry shocker Horrors of the Black Museum and Sidney Hayer’s agreeably fiendish Circus of Horrors. They deal respectively with a mad author and a mad plastic surgeon, and the least interesting aspect of each is a weak police procedural side plot. In Peeping Tom (Jack Watson, Nigel Davenport) the cops detect very little, and are instead used to highlight Mark’s aberrant behavior. Writer Leo Marks has wicked fun with a stealth homosexual frolic — Davenport’s inspector plays with Mark’s 16mm Bell & Howell, which to Mark might as well be an external sex organ. Our laughter is uneasy, as we feel the author’s sardonic presence.

Peeping Tom’s abortive theatrical release happened just two months before the debut of Hitchcock’s Psycho. Criterion’s essayist Megan Abbott suggests that Alfred Hitchcock took personal charge of Psycho’s theatrical rollout precisely to avoid a critical onslaught of the kind his colleague suffered in London. Hitchcock cancelled the customary advance press screenings outright. First-day attendees for Psycho had no idea what awaited them on the screen. Even The New York Times’ reviewer had to go to a public theater and mingle with ordinary customers — that screamed in approval of Hitchcock’s shocker. Who cared what a critic had to say?

 

Twin films with no direct connection.

Horror was on the rise in 1959, so it’s no surprise that two important filmmakers should both attempt movies about macabre killers. Although Hitchcock and Powell had known each other since the 1930s, nobody has suggested that they compared notes. We have to conclude that great minds think alike. Both Peeping Tom and Psycho combine coldness and compassion. Both make use of black humor. Psycho is rooted in Freudian aberrations. Tom is more of an intellectual puzzle investigating the nature of cinema. Both offer visual revelations at a staggering pace: Psycho’s mirror-doppelgangers, Peeping Tom’s Edward Hopper-like shot of Mark Lewis waiting at the base of a concrete housing structure, a mundane yet strangely sinister composition.  ↑  Mrs. Bates’ Victorian home and Mark Lewis’s rooming house are divided into psychological domains. Norman Bates hides Freudian secrets in his bedrooms and the cellar. Mark Lewis’s house boards ‘healthy people’ downstairs, below an attic that harbors macabre secrets and evidence of terrible crimes.

“The blind always live in the rooms they live under.”

Powell & Marks allude to human feelings that suggest extra-sensory abilities. Critic Raymond Durgnat wondered at the presence of Helen’s blind mother, who turns movie clichés associated with blind people into an asset. Mrs. Stephens has a preternatural ability to sense Mark’s presense — the ‘hair on the back of her neck stands up.’  She feels that something is not right about him and the films “he cannot wait to see.”  Mrs. Stephens likewise makes Mark nervous, who is terrified because she can ‘see’ despite being sightless. She can somehow ‘look right through him.’

 

Skull-DuggeryThe most alarming coincidental concordance between Psycho and Peeping Tom involves superimposed skull imagery — two very different scenes bear a chilling alignment. Most Hitchcock fans are well aware of the subliminal superimposure, at the end of Psycho, of a skull over Norman Bate’s smiling face.  ↑  As a dissolve begins to a scene in a swamp, a hint of the skull comes through, especially the teeth and the hollow eye sockets.

Peeping Tom accomplishes a similar effect without using dissolves.  ↗  In the projection setup in his secret lab, Mark Lewis despairs because he hasn’t gotten the shot of his victim’s final moment. He raises his arms, as if to hit the screen for betraying him. His projector is still running, throwing an image of Vivian’s face partly on the screen, and partly on the back of Mark’s jacket. Vivian’s face on the screen looks normal, but the part projected on Mark’s back has empty eye sockets, like a skull. It’s not an accident, but a deliberate camera trick that we didn’t notice on the first viewing. DVD Savant first pointed it out in 1999, but it must have been written up by others before.

Take a look, it’s as chilling as Hitchcock’s skull face — it’s Vivian’s subliminal ghost.

 

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The Criterion Collection’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of Peeping Tom 4K is the expected stunning improvement on Criterion’s DVD from 1999. It appears to be the same master as an English 4K disc released earlier this year by Studiocanal, whose logo repeats here. It’s followed by the cleanest, steadiest Anglo-Amalgamated logo we’ve ever seen. Ready for big screen projection, the 4K image looks impeccable. What a beautiful presentation for a film distributed in America as girlie exploitation: Astor Pictures plastered its posters with shock ad copy: “More Horrible Than Horror! More Terrible Than Terror!”

Criterion’s notes say it was remastered from the original Eastmancolor negative, at 6K. The picture is rock steady, with bold colors that have the handcrafted look of Powell’s earlier Technicolor classics. The old DVD had its share of digs and dirt, all since removed. Some shots do have more grain, perhaps indicating a reach to a lesser source. But the detail is stunning. The only thing that stands out now and then is the uniformity of color on faces, which may be a function of makeup.

The remaster does wonders with Peeping Tom’s carefully modulated soundtrack. Brian Easdale’s arresting music score uses a nervous piano for the main titles. The sharp and clear mono sound is full of effective surprises, such as the heartbeat that pounds through the scene where Helen’s blind mother meets Mark, and unnerves him with her apparent ability to ‘see’ his sickness.

 

“Good Night Daddy. Hold my hand.”

Following Criterion’s current trend, the feature is repeated on a second Blu-ray disc, which contains most of the video extras. A must-hear commentary by scholar, critic, filmmaker and feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, is repeated from 1999, and may have originated on an even earlier laserdisc. Her thoughtful analysis points out things that casual viewers will miss. I remember listening to the track 25 years ago and deciding that Criterion’s high reputation was fully deserved.

Powell & Pressburger expert Ian Christie provides the second commentary, which appears to come from the UK disc. Christie’s Criterion commentaries for  A Canterbury Tale and  I Know Where I’m Going are equally rewarding.

The two 1999 documentaries  The Eye of the Beholder and  A Very British Psycho are must-sees as well. Leo Marks is featured in the second, and gives us a glimpse of his unusual life. Raised in a famous book shop and recruited as a master codebreaker when he was barely out of school, Marks’s war experience had psychological effects. Marks’s sad, morbid poem was dedicated to fearless espionage martyrs like Violette Szabo. The cinematic teaming of Marks and Powell was bound to come up with something profoundly disturbing.

Crime novelst Megan Abbott’s insert text essay provides an excellent overview, capturing the essence of this slippery film. The full list of extras is below. Peeping Tom knocks us out every time … the filmmakers’ wicked games and coded messages will overwhelm the most self-content film addict (who, me?). We know the filmmakers are playing with our brains. This disc delivers an understanding not to be found on TV, cable, or even streaming.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

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Peeping Tom 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary with Ian Christie
Audio commentary with Laura Mulvey
Introduction by Martin Scorsese
Interview with editor Thelma Schoonmaker
Documentary The Eye of the Beholder with Schoonmaker, Scorsese, and actor Carl Boehm
Documentary A Very British Psycho with Leo Marks
Restoration featurette
Original Trailer
Folding insert with an essay by Megan Abbott.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD + one Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: May 24, 2024
(7136peep)

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Here’s Allison Anders on Peeping Tom: