industry arguably wasn’t terribly sad Powell
had stumbled — a cocksure genius, during
his time at the top he had disjointed more
noses than a plastic surgeon. Still, that doesn’t
really explain the vitriol. Peeping Tom wasn’t
the only sexually outré and violent film about
a lonely young murderer released that year.
Not even the only one released by a true
filmmaking legend: Hitchcock made a killing
with Psycho.
The difference in reception can partly
be explained by expectation: Hitchcock,
the consummate showman, made a virtue
of Psycho’s shock factor and, anyway, British
critics basically expected him to be vulgar (it
took the French, who welcomed the film with
open arms, to make him respectable).
The stronger reason, though, is within
the films themselves. Psycho gives you time to
empathise with Norman Bates before revealing
his killer instinct. Peeping Tom not only reveals
Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) to be a murderer
from the off, it makes you complicit. The film
opens on his trembling eye as it opens. Then,
through the viewfinder of his own, home film
camera, we see a seedy London street and
a bored prostitute informing him, “It’ll be two
quid,” before trudging up to her bedroom,
where erotic ennui quickly turns to confusion
and then terror. Psycho is the proto-slasher pic
most people have seen, but Peeping Tom fathers
the genre’s most disturbing element: the killer’s
eye view. Our trembling, sad, lonely antihero is
making his own murderous movie — the score
seems to reflect the film he is cutting, not the
overall picture — and we are alongside him in
his mental edit room.
Boehm spends 75 per cent of the movie
looking as if he’s about to come and isn’t
entirely happy about it. The troubling thing
is that despite seeing his brutality you grow
to feel sorry for this isolated boy, who relates
to the world through a lens and a mind fractured
by being experimented on by his psychologist
father (played by Powell in the films within
the film — with his own son, Columba, as
the young Mark). Mark has spent his whole
life afraid — and the film shows a tender
affinity for nervous men who spend their lives
in darkened rooms.
The script itself was conceived out of
observing fear. It was written by Leo Marks,
a master code-maker and breaker in World
War II, who spent years briefing agents who
knew they were likely to die. “Peeping Tom,”
he said, “was born in those briefing rooms.
I became convinced that all cryptographers
are basically voyeurs.” All filmmakers, too.
Martin Scorsese — an ardent fan, he cast
Marks as the voice of Satan in The Last
Temptation Of Christ — has said Peeping
Tom says everything that can be said about
filmmaking: “the aggression of it, how the
camera violates”. Not only is Peeping Tom’s
Mark making his own grubby home movie,
his day job is as a focus puller at a film
studio, and perhaps the most exhilarating
and troubling sequence in the whole film is
his carefully choreographed killing of Moira
Shearer — the star of The Red Shoes dancing
around a sound stage, eyes alive with hope
and love and creation, before he shuts them
forever. The film they are making each day
is called, wryly, The Walls Are Closing In,
and so it goes for Mark as the film concludes —
he cannot escape his nature, he cannot
escape his fear. He is a murderer, but also a sad,
needy victim.
Peeping Tom remains a startling, unseemly,
shocking film about the pleasure of watching
and the terror of being truly seen. The trailer
told audiences, “Fear him! But pity him also.”
Him and, also, yourself.MAX JOLIN — 7
SUPERMANDo you believe a man can fly, Max?
Obviously not. Literally impossible.But did you believe Superman could?
No. I believe it was his costume. Because
we never see him just go flying around
without his costume.What did you think of the costume?
It just looks like it was shop-bought. It’s
not a special one. It just looks like Jor-El
bought it from a shop.What did you like about the film?
Well, I liked the Lex Luthor in it more
than the Lex Luthor in Batman v
Superman, because he’s not as crazy
and he is a bit cooler. I also like it at the
start when they’re on Krypton, and I like
the spiky-ball thing that Superman gets
sent in to Earth. I also really liked it
when the water started pouring in and
the earthquake started happening after
the second nuclear bomb hit California.What about when Lois Lane dies?
Well, I was kind of relieved she didn’t
come back to life at first, but how she
did come back to life was impossible.
Because technically all that Superman
did was he flew around the world at way
more than light speed and suddenly it’s
a bit like it went back in time and Lois
Lane came back alive and everything was
fine again. I did not understand that.How many stars should the film get?
Three-and-a-half.Why can’t you go to four?
Mostly because of when Superman was
flying round Earth. That was just silly.
I absolutely hated that bit.Would you like to see Superman II?
Hmm. I liked the actor who plays General
Zod... I’d like to see how good it is.Mark Lewis (Carl
Boehm) has Helen
Stephens (Anna
Massey) in his sights.KIDS WATCH
CLASSICSBig films tackled by
little people
ILLUSTRATION OLLY GIBBS