PEEPING TOM Peeping Tom Criterion 58 1960 / Color / 1:85 anamorphic 16:9 / 101 min. / Street Date November 16, 1999 / 39.95 Starring Karl Boehm, Anna Massey, Moira Shearer, Esmond Knight, Shirley Anne Field, Jack Watson, Nigel Davenport, Miles Malleson, Pamela Green Cinematography Otto Heller Production Designer Arthur Lawson Film Editor Noreen Ackland Original Music Brian Easdale, Wally Stott Written by Leo Marks Produced and Directed by Michael Powell
	Reviewed by Glenn Erickson Forty years ago Peeping Tom premiered and disappeared within a week, becoming probably the most critically despised English film ever made. It effectively ended the film career of one of Britain's most creative and intelligent filmmakers. In 1980, Martin Scorsese rescued the film from oblivion, sparking a reevaluation that has redeemed its critical reputation. Criterion's DVD goes several steps further. In addition to a stunningly perfect presentation of this disturbing and fascinating movie, the new release also features a documentary that vividly captures the amazingly complex historical and intellectual puzzle that is Peeping Tom. Synopsis: Mark Lewis (Karl Boehm) is anintroverted feature camera assistant. His off hours are consumed with a secret obsession - filming the 'un-filmable' Face of Death on women being murdered ... while he is murdering them. He allows himself to be drawn into a relationship with the girl downstairs, Helen (Anna Massey, the hapless potato victim in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy), and tries his best to understand himself and perhaps work his way to a cure. It seems Mark was the childhood guinea pig of a scientist father who used him in cruel, mind-warping experiments, 'research' that the adult Mark is himself perversely continuing. This synopsis reads like a modern slasher film, which Peeping Tom never even begins to resemble. There is almost no blood, and none of the explicit violence of the same year's smash success Psycho. The film plays like a clever puzzle filled with clues: allusions, jokes, visual references. All center around the proposition that, by their vicarious involvement in the stories they watch, film viewers become complicit in the fantasies they experience. Peeping Tom is told with the 'inspired simplicity' that its director Michael Powell brought to an armload of classics (The Thief of Bagdad, I Know Where I'm Going, The Red Shoes) that defy the rules of both their genres and the times in which they were made. He specialized in stories that challenged English attitudes and assumptions, and in Peeping Tom took on the dangerous task of portraying the truth about the relationship between cinema and voyeurism, between the fantasies we seek on the screen and the fantasies we hide in our personalities. Although it is not an 'art' film, Peeping Tom is difficult to discuss without debating the appeal of movies as a link to forbidden desires, or contemplating the passive/active component of Film as Fantasy. This most intelligent film about cinema is a horror film. Michael Powell was crucified for making a 'perverse' movie, when what he and writer Leo Marks actually did was deliver the unwelcome truth that the fundamental perversity of filmmaking and movie watching makes us all Peeping Toms. The excellent, excellent Channel 4 U.K. documentary that accompanies Peeping Tom, A Very British Psycho is without a doubt the most rewarding DVD supplement Savant has ever seen. I've read a lot on this film but the docu was like a bullet to the brain, full of insights and inspirations. To begin with, half the show is about Tom writer Leo Marks, who was a top code master during WWII. How that story relates to Peeping Tom (and some wonderful poetry) makes for a very unusual structure. Marks' wartime job involved inventing 'unbreakable'codes (an impossibility) and sending people off to live or die on the quality of his intellectual work. Peeping Tom came about from the compassionate/ cold blooded relationship Marks had to maintain with his spy operatives, and the macabre intimacy he had with some of their horrible fates. In Marks' unenviable position, callous disregard for the lives of his agents was sometimes in the best interest of the War Effort. For Peeping Tom's Mark Lewis (Leo Marks' name in code?), the inhuman half of the equation has taken over. In his quest for the 'un-filmable image' Lewis has alienated himself from the human race, and become a serial killer. Through beautiful on-camera interviews with many of the principals involved, the docu also shows how the film was destroyed by the critics, its relationship to Psycho and how Hitchcock avoided repeating Powell's commercial fate. The docu is also one of the few to intelligently use clips from the film it is studying. Bits of scenes are even successfully reenacted: "What paper am I from? Oh. The Observer." Peeping Tom effectively uses color schemes and lighting to create specific psychological reactions; you can feel the atmosphere at times. Vittorio Storaro once wrote an essay in American Cinematographer about the psychological effects of color in One From the Heart. The editors of that magazine felt it necessary to print an insulting disclaimer after the article stating it didn't endorse Storaro's theories! Peeping Tom was the movie that made me feel Storaro was right after all. Helen rises into a shadowy closeup as she watches some unspeakable projected image, with watery highlights in her eyes showing her terror. The fleeting glimpse of nudie model Milly (Pamela Green) lying across the bottom of the frame, a glowing, slightly overexposed altar of red flesh, has the effect of an erotic hallucination. Peeping Tom and Psycho are opposite sides of the same Horror coin, movies with completely different approaches to similar material. Both are complex and illuminating in different ways. Psycho is rooted in clinical truth about psychotic killers, whereas Tom is a less organic (but more enlightening) intellectual puzzle based on the nature of cinema itself. Both offer visual revelations in staggering succession: Psycho's mirror-doppelgangers, Peeping Tom's strange Hopper-like shot of Mark Lewis waiting at the base of a concrete housing structure, an uncannily sinister composition. Every aspect of the film has its own fantastic dimension. The rooms of Mark Lewis' house, for example, seem to represent psychological domains, with his curtained, dark, film-filled lab the secret repository of taboo memories. A surprise after all these years is to see a precursor of Hitchcock's superimposed Psycho skull-face in one very complex shot (see below). Note that only the part of the image of Moira Shearer projected onto the screen has eyes in its eye sockets! Criterion's DVD is stunning to behold. Here for once is a fairly obscure horror film whose critical visual dimension is well served. The colors and textures leap off the screen; the opening Soho street scene is so garish it jumps out at you. Both the feature and the documentary are mastered in full-resolution 16:9. The shelves of the girlie magazine shop are lined with dozens of dirty postcards whose contents were a blur on the laser disc but now are crystal clear. The 1:66 aspect ratio is achieved in 16:9 by placing narrow black 'bookends' onto the sides of the image. Flat-widescreen films were meant to be cropped off to varying degrees and Savant thinks Criterion used excellent judgment in this case. The mono sound is sharp and clear and full of effective surprises, such as the heartbeat that pounds through the scene where Helen's blind mother meets Mark, and unnerves him with her apparent ability to 'see' his sickness. Laura Mulvey's commentary track, analyzing the film in Cinema 101 detail shot by shot, is best sampled after seeing the documentary. Although good, it is definitely deep dish art-speak. Then again, seeing the docu will convert many viewers into wanting to hear as much analysis of Peeping Tom as they can! A simple paper insert reprints Ms. Mulvey's liner notes from the previous laser disc. The only conceivable weakness to the DVD is the box art, which not only is unattractive, but manages to obscure the film's title. Nobody is going to find this one on a store shelf. Criterion's Peeping Tom DVD restores one's faith in horror films, movie documentaries, and general intelligence in the cinema universe. Criterion is to be applauded for retransferring this superior film in such stunning fashion. If you aren't inclined to buy it, for heaven's sake find a way to rent Peeping Tom ... it's a film that can alter one's perception of what movies are. On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Peeping Tom rates: Movie: Excellent+ Video: Excellent Sound: Excellent Supplements: Excellent + Packaging: Amaray Case Reviewed: November 23,1999. Text (c) Copyright 1999 Glenn Erickson Other Michael Powell - Emeric Pressburger reviews: I Know Where I'm Going! ... Black Narcissus [Savant Main Page] [Savant Links] [Article Index] [Review Index] [Savant 5 Year Report] DVD Savant Text © Copyright 2007 Glenn Erickson Advertise With Us Review Staff | About DVD Talk | Newsletter Subscribe | Join DVD Talk Forum Copyright © DVDTalk.com All rights reserved | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use