The other day I watched a motion picture I have avoided watching for decades: Peeping Tom. I have avoided it largely because of its bad advance press and because I’m so crazy about so many others of Powell’s pictures, several of which are among my very favorite films.
Peeping Tom is a creepy little picture about a young focus puller, somebody who tends the camera when a movie is being shot, who, abused by his psychologist father becomes a scopophile (a word you probably only know if you’ve seen this movie or are a psychiatrist/psychologist dealing in abnormal psychology) and serial killer, literally killing with his camera. I won’t summarize the film for you. There are plenty of places you can find the plot summary.
Peeping Tom was released in 1960, just a few months before Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and both critics and the public loathed it. It was pulled just a few weeks after it was released and more or less disappeared until it was resurrected by the movie’s most prominent fan, Martin Scorsese. It is said to have destroyed Powell’s career. He was only 55 when the film was released and should have been at the peak of his creative career. After PT he did a bit of television, directed one German picture and a couple of Australian pictures. It’s pretty clear that he was ostracized, blacklisted.
My question is why did this happen to Michael Powell on the basis of this film? It is no more distasteful than Psycho which enhanced Hitchcock’s reputation and career, if anything, possibly less so.
One frequently encountered explanation of the reaction to PT is that it draws the viewer into it and involves the viewer, enlisting the viewer as an accomplice as it were. Unlike Psycho’s sterile (but beautifully shot) television-style black and white it’s shot in that gorgeous, saturated British technicolor, the technicolor of Alexander Korda and lots of highbrow movies of the forties and fifties. It’s shot in the style of a movie with loving closeups, follows, and pans rather than in the three camera television style in which Psycho is shot.
The main character of the movie, played by Austrian actor Carl Boehm with just the tiniest hint of accent, is damnably sympathetic. We know why he does what he does, that it’s not his fault, and we’re rooting for him right to the very last shots. There is a path to sanity for him. Can he mend? Can he escape? Will he be caught? Will he live?
Boehm has the same soft, blond, angelic beauty of any number of young leading men at the time—Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue, even the young Robert Redford. That’s another similarly with Psycho. It’s hard to imagine it now but Tony Perkins was a teen idol in the 1950s, an intense, sensitive young actor somewhat in the fashion of James Dean without Dean’s panache. Perhaps that’s another quality that repelled the public.
Peeping Tom has a number of intriguing features beyond grand technicolor and its shooting and editing. Much of it takes place on a sound stage (including one of the murders in which, ironically the heroine of Powell’s The Red Shoes, Moira Shearer, is slain almost in a symbolic slaying of Powell’s earlier work) or in a film workroom, surrounded by film editing and processing equipment. With the over the shoulder camera work, the sound stage and workroom Powell is almost inviting you into his world, disquietingly so in a theme reminiscent of Rear Window, as if to say “There’s something not quite normal in spending your life peering through a viewfinder”. Or watching a screen for that matter.
BTW don’t miss Moira Shearer’s wonderful jazz dance sequence. She really was a mesmerizing dancer.
Also, too, there’s a highly appealing performance by a very young Anna Massey, daughter of Raymond.
With the exceptions of the opening and closing credits all of the music in PT is provided realistically in the the form of music taped or played on the radio.
In the end I’m mystified as to why Hitchcock prospered by his “ahead of its time” film while Powell was destroyed by his. The difference may have been in the characters of the two men and how the public and people in the industry felt about them.
I’ve put it on my netflix list. I’m familiar with some of his other films, Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and The Red Shoes, both of which I esteem. It sounds, from the wiki description, a bit “advanced” for 1960. Even more so than Psycho, which, when you come down to it, is more geeky than scary. In fact, the movie as described in the wiki page seems to me to have more in common with Hitchcock’s Frenzy, made 12 years later, in a era more receptive.
Yes, the comparison with Frenzy is apt. However, and this is something I’d planned to mention in the body of the post, much as I love Hitchcock PT is psychologically truer than anything that Hitchcock ever made. I think that Hitchcock’s psychology is terribly clunky and that was true right to the end.
Oddly, I didn’t find Peeping Tom nearly as lurid as I’d expected. Although it’s plenty lurid, especially for a mainstream picture in 1960.
In addition to those you’ve mentioned of Powell’s pictures I strongly recommend:
49th Parallel
A Matter of Life and Death
Black Narcissus
I’ve not seen it, but have seen it discussed in a few different history of the cinema shows, maybe even one on Scorsese’s influences?
I did see this gem in the Wiki entry: “One reason suggested in the documentary is that Hitchcock, seeing the negative press reaction to Peeping Tom, decided to release Psycho without a press screening”
I also wonder if the names are important, one is named in a way emphasizing the sexuality of the movie, the other emphasizes violence.
“PT is psychologically truer”
I think there is your issue and answer.
Getting too close to reality is difficult for many. Better the Hollywood, or “cleansed” treatment.
I think Drew’s got it: Too real to be entertaining.
While I now choose to avoid gory, psychologically dark films, I used to enjoy them when I was younger. Even with a then-high tolerance, I had to walk out of Polanski’s “Repulsion”.
I wasn’t identifying with any character in the film at all, but the story was told deftly enough to pull me into the psychopathology of the main character. In fact, that film–the only film I’ve walked out of, ever–may have been the one that told me I didn’t need to dive into other people’s shit, even if it was fictional shit.
At least on film… I still enjoy ‘Dexter’ and he’s certainly pretty FU-ed.
I think Drew alludes to something else. Powell was a British director, and Hitchock was a British director who had moved to America. To be truly ostracized one must first be a part of a community, and it’s more difficult to ostracize someone with more than one community.
Being a fan of the Hammer films of the time (58-69), I can imagine the technicolor being a factor, since the color appeared to be a factor in British censors and critics of those films. (The British were more strict than the Americans) For instance, if Psycho had been shot in lush technicolor, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the shower scene would have had to have been redone to remove the vivid sensuality of the flesh tones and the glaring brilliance of the blood circling the drain.