A few thoughts on returning to Peeping Tom after 15 years.

How sleazy, pulpy, schlocky the film is. Within a few minutes of the opening,
there's a prostitute on a lonely Soho street, the prostitute taking a client
up to a shabby room, the murder of the prostitute, the anti-hero (Mark)
watching his own film of the murder (over the opening credits), an old man
buying soft porn in a newsagent, and Mark producing soft porn (photographing
semi-clad women in a studio).
Peeping Tom has been widely celebrated as one of the great films about
looking, about consumption, about cinema, about art, about the artist, about
the relation between the artist, the artwork and the audience, about the
relation between looking and pleasure, looking and desire, looking and death,
and so on. All very familiar stuff from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis
and film studies (the film’s tailor-made for film studies - bring in some
Freud here, some Bataille and de Sade there, add a little Lacan and Virillio,
etc). The aggressive and violating camera, as Scorsese put it. And this is
partly the problem with Peeping Tom. Like the films of Peter Greenaway or
David Cronenberg, Peeping Tom is more like an academic essay about voyeurism
and scopophilia, a join-the-dots lecture on the pleasures, risks and dangers
of art. Plus, Peeping Tom employs the most stereotypical, clichéd thriller/
murder mystery plot you can imagine: a young man, a loner, a misfit,
introspective, morbid, an outsider figure, abused as a child, etc etc etc, who
murders sexualized women (prostitutes and actresses), and is befriended by an
innocent he cannot bring himself to corrupt or kill.
Powell attacks the subject of voyeurism and murder aggressively in the opening
scenes: the close-ups on cameras, projectors and eyes, the mirrors and
reflections, exaggerated sounds (the rattle of a projector, a dripping tap, a
heartbeat, whispered voiceover), and his love of visual rhymes and puns (eyes,
drinks, sticks and tripods). You can see Powell having a ball in orchestrating
his elaborate camera moves, his erotic, sleazy mise-en-abyme, his
film-within-a-film tropes (Powell playing the murderer's father and torturer
in home movies which he shot himself), the multiple reflections, mirrors,
lenses, cameras, projections and screens (every shot in Peeping Tom seems to
have been lit by a raking, unfiltered, unflattering horizontal light). It's
not that Powell isn't at the top of his game in Peeping Tom - in its way,
Peeping Tom is every bit as inventive as Powell's best work - it's that the
plot, the characters, the situations are so cheesy, predictable, and shallow.
Despite all this, though, Peeping Tom does have bite and a nastiness which age
hasn't dimmed. Peeping Tom also still feels 'contemporary' in its
psychoanalytic treatment of a serial killer plot which draws on prostitution,
cinema, acting, and pornography. And the conceit of having a murder in the
opening shots which's replayed a moment later over the credits is a
tour-de-force (one of the film's best cinematic ideas, this says everything
necessary, and economically, in the first five minutes).
One of Powell's chief rivals with Peeping Tom is Hitchcock, of course, who had
often tackled the very same subject in films such as Rear Window and Vertigo,
and in the film was released around the time of Peeping Tom, Psycho. Comparing
the two, Psycho has aged better than Peeping Tom; maybe it's the quality of
performances (both Perkins and Leigh are outstanding), maybe it's the
fantastic ending of Psycho, maybe it's the British setting of Peeping Tom
which seems much more archaic now than the American milieu of Psycho (in
Peeping Tom, people still call other 'old boy', and that bland late Fifties
jazz really dates a film). Both films have many affinities, of course: lonely
murderer, multiple murders, female victims, violence; both share tropes of
eyes, voyeurism, eroticism, and so on. And both Peeping Tom and Psycho are
helmed by British veterans who loved showing off their skills, who relished
the controlled environment of the studio, who were notorious for their
treatment of actors, who pursued the themes of voyeurism, eroticized violence,
and men looking at women throughout their careers.
Powell also gets to revisit his musical extravaganza days in Peeping Tom, when
he has Moira Shearer, a stand-in and wannabe star at one of the big British
studios, leap around a sound stage after hours before becoming another murder
victim. Shearer doesn't just do a few steps, she does a whole dance routine,
which extends far beyond the demands of the plot (Boehm has little to do
except shift lamps and furniture around while the camera cranes and tracks
Shearer's lithe, mobile figure, in true Minnelli/ MGM style).
Ken Russell was bemused by Powell's decision to make Peeping Tom, in which 'he
engineered his own suicide... Has any other director in the history of the
cinema been buried by one of his own movies?' (1993). I don't agree with Uncle
Ken: and if it was 'suicide', it was a helluva way to go.
It was more complicated, more ambiguous than that. Loads of directors recover
from villified or flop films (Cimino after Heaven's Gate, Lynch after Dune,
Hyams after End of Days, Sonnenfeld after Wild, Wild West, Coppola after One
From the Heart and Jack, de Palma after Mission To Mars, Harlin after
Cutthroat Island, de Bont after Speed 2, Verhoeven after Showgirls, etc).
Peeping Tom has rightly been reconsidered and reinstated as a Powell classic
after its initial critical drubbing (whereas some of the above films deserve
to die a thousand deathss). Many flops are not so bad after all (Heaven's
Gate, for example, has some of the most exquisite cinematography in a modern
movie), and many flops have a cult following. (But you've got to drawe the
line somewhere: Speed 2, Battlefield Earth, Ishtar, The Avengers).
David Thomson seems closer to the truth: 'few directors ever had a milestone
like that film, and I am still not quite sure whether to believe the standard
explanation of how it stopped his career. After all, failures do not deter
lesser directors, and Michael was only 55 when Tom opened. There had always
been a feeling in Britain that he was dangerous or unsound; it was all the
stranger in that Michael's genius went straight back to Chaucer, Hogarth, the
Celtic Revival, Dickens, fairy stories and gallows humor. But he was
un-English, too; he accepted the passion of story without demur; he thought
excess was fundamental and he disdained the forms of politeness. He knew that
everything valuable was fatal. He took it for granted that there was beauty
and monstrousness in all of us.'
What's true is that Powell never regained the heights of Peeping Tom or any of
his other classics after it. Peeping Tom does seem to be the cut-off point in
the Powell œuvre.
What's memorable about Peeping Tom is Boehm's hesitant, shy performance, Anna
Massey's enormous eyes and brisk and unflaggingly, impossibly guileless
manner, Powell's director's bag of tricks opening up the pulp fiction story,
the elements of (auto)biography (the actresses on screen that Powell had
affairs with, the home movies, Mark as stand-in for Powell as director), and
the vehemence underneath the polite, restrained middle-class dialogue and
characters. Peeping Tom doesn't have the polish and grandeur of a film like
Vertigo, but it's far superior to critically lauded films which treat some of
the same themes, such as Blue Velvet.
Boehm was a brave casting choice, though he lacks charisma and subtlety, and
cannot quite depict the depths of suffering and contradiction in the
character. You wonder if other actors might've been made more of the role
(someone like James Mason, for example. Too old, true, but terrific as the
troubled Humbert in 'Lolita' released a couple of years later). Luckily, if
Boehm is a little plodding, he is surrounded by some solid performances,
particularly from Anna Massey, who manages to sustain the portrayal of a woman
who's determined, right up to the end, to believe that her lover can't
possibly be a sick, abused psychopath and serial killer (a theme revisited in
many movies - most recently in the cycle of neo-noir or 'erotic thrillers').
Much of the time, though, Massey's character exists simply to reflect Mark or
provide a pretext for his ramblings, and it's a bit pathetic when, at the
climax, she faints away in the manner of a 19th century romantic heroine.
The awkwardness of Boehm's performance enhances his character, but neither his
nor Massey's characters are believable personalities, just as the London
settings, the film studio, Mark's father's house, Soho, etc, aren't
particularly convincing. But then, they're not meant to be. In 1960, while the
French New Wave directors were shooting on the streets of Paris in a loose,
handheld, spontaneous style, and the British 'kitchen sink' directors were
shooting on location, Powell preferred to stay in the studio, controlling
every aspect of the filmmaking process. Powell has never been a convincing
naturalistic director, and when he attempts to portray something like a
'realistic' party filled with 'realistic' people of the late 1950s/ early
1960s (such as the people and dialogue at the 21st birthday party, for
example), it looks stilted and false. But this is also precisely why Powell is
a much, much greater director than Ken Loach, Karel Reisz and the whole
social-realist 'kitchen sink' troupe.