Peeping Tom (Re)
United States 1960, 109 mins
Director: Michael Powell
Director: Michael Powell
Michael Powell's controversial meditation on violence and voyeurism effectively destroyed his career when it was first released, but later generations have come to regard it as a masterpiece.
Karl Heinz Boehm stars as Mark, the son of a psychologist who kept a video journal of the boy's upbringing for research purposes. The constant intrusions profoundly affected the boy, who grew up to be a photographer himself; but his principal subject matter is women whom he murders before the camera. He then runs the films of his victims in their final throes of suffering so that he can study their reactions to death - a perverse extension of his father's experiments.
The British press had long been hostile to the unorthodox films of Powell and his partner Emeric Pressburger; when PEEPING TOM came around, they used the film to castigate him as "sick" and tawdry. The passage of time has proven PEEPING TOM to be as profound and accomplished as any of Powell's earlier films, and it ranks with Alfred Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW (1954) and VERTIGO (1958) as a landmark exploration of the links between voyeurism, violence and male sexual desire. Powell himself plays the evil father in the flashback sequences, and his son Colomba plays Mark as a child.
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