Michael Powell (1960)
Its reception by critics is reckoned to have ended Michael Powell’s career in Britain. The Queen’s Guards (1961) had already been completed by the time Peeping Tom was released: his next UK-financed film, The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972), was his last but one (and his last with Emeric Pressburger). Now fifty years old, Peeping Tom is widely regarded as a masterpiece – perhaps thanks in part to its original mauling, it bounced back into greatest-ever films lists well before Powell’s death in 1990. His career didn’t deserve to run aground because of a piece of work regarded at the time as morally objectionable – Peeping Tom may be morally questionable but it’s morally serious – but the admiration for the film in its afterlife isn’t merited either.
A young man called Mark Lewis murders women and records on camera their reactions as he kills them. Mark works as a focus puller[1] at a British film studio: it’s not surprising that Michael Powell would be drawn to the technical possibilities of the scenario. One of Powell’s flaws as a director is that he’s a poor – at any rate, a perfunctory – director of actors. The characters in the Archers’ films, with rare exceptions (like the couple played by Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey in I Know Where I’m Going!), are subordinate to the visual sophistication and imagination of the piece[2]. As a result, these movies often contain people who seem woodenly detached – there may be a degree of poetic justice in the fact that Powell was undone by the critics who deplored Peeping Tom for its amoral observation. (In one of the few jokes in the script, a member of the public asks Mark, who’s in the street filming the aftermath of the murder he’s just committed, what paper he’s from. After nervous hesitation, Mark answers, ‘The Observer’.) I suspect, though, that those same qualities led to the film’s being revered by cinéastes in later years. The picture addresses the voyeurism of film-makers – and film-goers – in a very salient way. Plenty of people today will feel more comfortable with the treatment of scoptophilia through technique rather than character.
The film’s title may have been taken by its detractors as confirmation of its prurience but though it’s a catchy title it’s also a rather misleading one. Away from the film studios, Mark takes photographs of tarty women in a room above a newsagent’s shop. The shop’s proprietor supplements his income by selling the pictures to his customers – the one we see buys a book of them along with his Times and Telegraph. (Since the customer is played by Miles Malleson, the character is more enjoyable than perhaps he’s meant to be – but the implication that what goes on in the newsagent’s illustrates an unexpected underside to respectable life is rather undermined by the porno pictures being plastered on the shop door. I wasn’t clear either why Mark had this sideline beyond the fact that one of the models at the newsagent’s turns out to be his last victim.) Mark is sexually timid and (we assume) inexperienced. His psychopathology is thanks to his father, a scientist who researched the effects of fear on the nervous system and who carried out experiments on his young son. Professor A N Lewis, whose collected works occupy most of Mark’s bookshelves, tested – and filmed – the boy’s reaction to a lizard in his bed and to sitting by his mother’s corpse (as well as indulging in simpler acts of voyeurism, like watching a necking couple). Mark’s inherited obsession – which he can neither bear nor resist – is to see people’s fear. That’s why, when he kills women (they always are women), he has to have his camera record not only their terror of dying but their realisation that the murder is being filmed and that they can see their own terror. His victims’ horror is, it seems, analogous to the horror that Mark felt participating in his father’s experiments – and that he feels watching these singular home movies. The scheme of the family background is Freudian but with a distinctive modification. After Mark’s mother dies, his father remarries within six weeks; his new wife is a woman whose identity is primarily (even brazenly) sexual.
Mark has a flat at the top of a big house in London: it’s here that he develops and watches the films he’s made. At first we assume he rents the flat but it transpires that he owns the house, bequeathed to him by his father. In other words, the other people who live there are tenants of Mark’s inheritance; he is the permanent resident of his past. (All the rooms in the house are wired so that Mark can hear what’s going on in them – I wasn’t sure how this connected to his pathological watchfulness.) Since we know from the start that the protagonist is a killer and how he goes about his business (even if the details of the tripod-mounted weapon aren’t revealed until later on), we need to be fascinated and unsettled by him in order to sustain our interest in what follows. Carl Boehm as Mark Lewis is somewhat intriguing – but in the wrong way. No one in Peeping Tom comments on Mark’s heavily accented English – so that his Aryan looks become an elephant in the room (especially as the film was made when Nazi sadism was such recent history). Boehm’s Mark is creepily etiolated – there’s no way anyone could find him otherwise. It’s hard to understand what the intelligent, self-possessed young woman Helen (Anna Massey), who lives in his house, sees in Mark. You don’t need to be Helen’s blind but psychically perceptive mother (Maxine Audley) to spot him and beware. Carl Boehm can’t suggest any normality that Mark’s messed-up psyche is getting in the way of. What sympathy you feel is largely for Boehm’s limitations as an actor.
Peeping Tom begins with the murder of a prostitute. The strength of Brenda Bruce’s characterisation makes the sequence more than just visually startling but the other whory women are stylised in a way that reduces them to elements of the film’s design. There’s a weightlessness to each of the subsequent murders because the victims don’t seem fully human. This is true not only of Pamela Green as one of the models in the room above the newsagent’s (her briefly bared breast may, according to Sight and Sound , be the first of its kind in commercial British cinema) but also of Moira Shearer as Vivian, a stand-in for the leading lady (Shirley Anne Field) at the film studios. Shearer’s looks and physique are so striking that it’s hard to accept her as an understudy anyway and she’s a very artificial performer. The sequence which ends in Vivian’s murder has its scary moments but goes on so long that I was relieved when Mark got round to doing the deed. Anna Massey, in one of her first screen roles, is slightly stagy but she’s distinctively human and witty as Helen – it matters what happens to her. (She survives: that the nice girl escapes with her life is not the only cliché in Leo Marks’s script for this supposedly radical piece of cinema. The sadistic scientist father is another.) I enjoyed seeing some familiar faces from 1960s television in this very different context – Bartlett Mullins as the newsagent, Jack Watson as the detective leading the search for the killer. His sidekicks are played by Keith Baxter and Nigel Davenport. The latter comes through particularly strongly in spite of the fact that (unless I misheard it) his surname changes from Dawson to Miller in consecutive sequences.
Michael Powell put himself in this film in a way that might seem to refute charges of prurient externality but which seems to have made critics in 1960 all the more uncomfortable. Arthur Baden, the director of the film on which Mark Lewis is one of the crew, may well be a self-portrait of Powell (the connection of surnames suggests as much) but Baden, as played by Esmond Knight, is such a familiar (tedious) caricature of a temperamental tyrant that there’s no charge in this particular connection. Much more striking is that, when Mark Lewis watches home movies of his childhood, we glimpse Powell playing Professor Lewis. The child Mark is played by Powell’s son Columba.
21 October 2010
[1] Wikipedia’s definition of ‘focus puller’ is ‘1st assistant cameraman, … a member of a film crew’s camera department whose primary responsibility is to maintain image sharpness whatever subject or action is being filmed’.
[2] Afternote: After seeing – or seeing again – several of Powell’s films in the years since this review, I think that judgment is somewhat unfair. At any rate, there are, as well as the two shining exceptions mentioned here, plenty of other good performances in the pictures he made with Emeric Pressburger. Not in Peeping Tom, though.
