Peeping Tom
(1959)
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Mark Lewis, assistant cameraman at a London film studio, aspiring movie director, part-time taker of pornographic pictures, and amateur documentary film-maker, has begun murdering women. He kills them, literally, with his camera and films the attacks and the murders. He also surrepititiously films what he can of the police investigation. At night he carefully screens and edits the footage. This is his great documentary, his life's work. Mark leads the police closer and closer so that he can film the denouement, his own imminent capture and suicide. |
This infamous thriller was director Michael Powell's first solo project after 20 years of collaboration with Emeric Pressburger. A Freudian nightmare about a film technician (Carl Boehm) who photographs the look of terror in the eyes of the women he kills, it was badly received at the time and destroyed Powell in this country. Only in recent years has it been recognised, by directors such as Martin Scorsese (who was instrumental in having the film restored and re-released in the late-1970s), as a risk-all masterpiece from one of our greatest film-makers. Maxine Audley and Moira Shearer are among those who encounter the killer's lethal voyeurism, while Powell himself plays the father who created a monster.
Halliwell's Film Guide
Thoroughly disagreeable suspenser, a kind of compendium of the bad taste the director showed in flashes during his career.