Peeping Tom (1960)

A young man murders women, using a movie camera to film their dying expressions of terror.

Director:

Michael Powell

Writers:

Leo Marks (original story), Leo Marks (screenplay)

Stars:

Karlheinz Böhm, Anna Massey, Moira Shearer

Cast

Complete credited cast:
Karlheinz Böhm	...	Mark Lewis (as Carl Boehm)
Moira Shearer	...	Vivian
Anna Massey	...	Helen Stephens
Maxine Audley	...	Mrs. Stephens
Brenda Bruce	...	Dora
Miles Malleson	...	Elderly Gentleman Customer
Esmond Knight	...	Arthur Baden
Martin Miller	...	Dr. Rosen
Michael Goodliffe	...	Don Jarvis
Jack Watson	...	Chief Insp. Gregg
Shirley Anne Field	...	Pauline Shields (as Shirley Ann Field)
Pamela Green	...	Milly

Storyline

Mark Lewis, works as a focus puller in a British film studio. On his off hours, he supplies a local porno shop with cheesecake photos and also dabbles in filmmaking. A lonely, unfriendly, sexually repressed fellow, Mark is obsessed with the effects of fear and how they are registered on the face and behavior of the frightened. This obsession dates from the time when, as a child, he served as the subject of some cold-blooded experiments in terror conducted by his own scientist father. As a grown man, Mark becomes a compulsive murderer who kills women and records their contorted features and dying gasps on film. His ongoing project is a documentary on fear. With 16mm camera in hand, he accompanies a prostitute to her room and stabs her with a blade concealed in his tripod, all the while photographing her contorted face in the throes of terror and death. Alone in his room, he surrounds himself with the sights and sounds of terror: taped screams, black-and-white "home movies" of convulsed...

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Plot Keywords:

serial killer | filmmaking | british horror | psychopathic killer | serial murderer | 

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Taglines:

marked for death by Peeping Tom - To Look Meant Danger To Smile Meant Death!

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Genres:

Drama | Horror | Thriller

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Certificate:

Not Rated

Did You Know?

Trivia

This is considered the British counterpart of "Psycho (1960)." Though it was banned for many years and so it did not become a box office smash like "Psycho," filmmakers that saw it when it opened cite it as being similarly influential, maybe more so. Although the set pieces are more artfully constructed in "Psycho," the killer in "Peeping Tom" is much more tragic and sympathetic, a major innovation for film at the time.

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Goofs

Trunk with the body is left open by chief inspector, but in the next shot of it, it is closed.

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Quotes

[first lines]
[Mark approaches the prostitute, covertly filming her]
Dora: It'll be two quid

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Alternate Versions

In the scene where Mark is about to kill the 'model' "Milly" she lays on the bed bare breasted. For the US version they had to re-shoot with her breasts covered.

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Connections

Referenced in How Didn't This Get Made?: Kaleidnohope (2020)

User Reviews

Revered and reviled, but no longer ignored

In these supposed enlightened times, director Michael Powell is considered a genius of British cinema. Emerging during the War as one of Britain's finest craftsmen, Powell and his partner Emeric Pressburger created the undisputed classics The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (1943), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948).

But despite critical and commercial success, his career was in tatters by the early 1960's. The abrupt death of Powell's career can virtually be pinned down to one film, his most uncompromising portrait of madness, 1960's Peeping Tom.

Powell's infamous shocker opens with a movie camera-wielding Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) following a prostitute to her boarding house room. Once inside, he slides a spike from his tripod leg and films her action of terror before stabbing her to death. As the credits roll, we find Mark alone in his apartment, replaying the footage with wide-eyed fascination.

As the film progresses, Mark is revealed as a stuttering loner whose sex drive has been somehow twisted into a murderous voyeuristic mania - working at a movie studio by day, he moonlights as a ‘glamour' photographer above a seedy newsagents. His blonde buxom model (Pamela Green), constantly taunting his virility, is the embodiment of the female he despises. The inquisitive girl downstairs, on the other hand, becomes his ideal and his possible salvation. Ultimately she is doomed by her altruistic attraction when she insists Mark must show her one of his 'films'. Horrified, she watches Mark as a child, tortured by his father's camera experiment of recording a child's reaction to fear. Mark's own experiment of filming his murder victims leads him on a downward spiral of insanity to the film's tragic conclusion.

Despite Peeping Tom's sensational subject matter, Powell's intention was deadly serious: to make a sober study of sexual violence, as well as a meditation on the audience's role of voyeur. Powell's camera positions us directly behind Mark and his spectators so that we become his unwilling accomplices - the audience watches Mark watching his films. Carl Boehm as Mark gives a chilling performance, at once icy reserve and murderous rage. Powell creates a garish red and pale blue twilight landscape of backstreet London in perfect detail.

At the film's completion, Powell believed he had made a masterpiece. Peeping Tom is certainly a personal film; Powell and his co-scriptwriter toiled for months until they had mastered a sympathetic three-dimensional serial killer. In later years, Powell would remain tight-lipped about his real reasons for making the film. But Britain's premiere 'glamour' pinup queen Pamela Green - Peeping Tom's photo-model and penultimate victim - would offer clues to Powell's hidden agenda.

Green became his leading choice for the role, although she had not appeared outside 8mm stag films, after seeing a life-sized nude portrait in her business partner Harrison Mark's studio. Her initial reception on the set was one of polite British reserve - until Powell unleashed his Jekyll and Hyde personality and she became one among many targets for his boorish, intimidating manner. On the day of Green's death scene, Powell changed his former plans of prudence and demanded she sprawl topless across her bed before she is skewered with Mark's tripod leg. She reluctantly gave in. Mid-shot she looked across the studio in horror. Beneath Powell's camera were his two pre-teen sons, watching unwaveringly according to their father's instructions. This incident brought a chill over Powell's casting of his son as Mark junior and of himself as Mark's father.

Whatever reasons drove Powell to make Peeping Tom, he had effectively signed his career's death warrant. The film opened to scathing reviews in April 1960, just months after the similarly-themed Psycho. Ironically, Hitchcock floated out of the controversy surrounding Psycho as the consummate old trickster, and saved his slowly sinking career. The time seemed ripe for Peeping Tom among audiences and critics alike. Unfortunately for Powell, the critics could find none of Psycho's black humour in his sober tome. 'Sick' and ‘vile' were a small sample of their vitriol. The papers were outraged that a filmmaker of Powell's calibre could sink his talents into material so vulgar and perverse. Powell hoped the distributor would weather the storm and allow the audience to find the film on its own merits. Instead, the plug was pulled on Peeping Tom after five days and at least in Britain the film was buried.

The print was sold to the American Roadshow circuit, with a lurid ad campaign designed to sell the film to a jaded American public. Shorn of twenty minutes footage, the film was considered too 'British' and was shelved after a limited run. There it sat, gathering dust for almost 20 years. Then in 1978 a cabal of admiring filmmakers led by Martin Scorsese (himself no stranger to controversy) rescued a complete print from Britain. Peeping Tom was thus relaunched in 1979 at the prestigious New York Film Festival to a predictably mixed reception. Correct-minded commentators grudgingly accepted its 'masterpiece' tag but were nonplussed with the Film's treatment of its sexual violence.

As for Powell, the British film industry no longer considered him bankable after Peeping Tom. He made one more film in Britain before exiling himself to Australia. The antipodean They're A Weird Mob (1966) was on of his final films before his death in 1984. Luckily for Powell, the film he considers his masterpiece is still revered and reviled, but no longer ignored.

Details

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Release Date:

16 May 1960 (UK)

Also Known As:

Face of Fear

Filming Locations:

Fitzrovia, London, England, UK

Box Office

Budget:

GBP135,000 (estimated)

Cumulative Worldwide Gross:

$24,640

Company Credits

Production Co:

Michael Powell (Theatre)

Technical Specs

Runtime:

101 min 86 min (cut)

Sound Mix:

Mono (Westrex Recording System)

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.75 : 1