April 21st: PEEPING TOM (Michael Powell, 1960)

Disturbed photographer Mark Lewis murders women while filming them with a movie camera.

Michael Powell, along with his professional partner Emeric Pressburger, were responsible for some of the greatest works of the British film industry in the 1940s and 50s, including The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp. When their partnership amicably ended in 1958, Powell briefly left England to make films abroad.

Returning to his homeland, Powell found a story that would lead him to turn the camera on himself in more ways than one. A script by former cryptographer-turned-playwright Leo Marks was conceived during World War II when he was breaking codes, which he viewed as an indirect form of voyeurism.

After looking at several local actors, Powell hired German actor Carl Boehm, known mostly for his work in popular costume dramas. Joining him are an array of younger British actors, with appearances by former Powell collaborators Moira Shearer (The Red Shoes) and Esmond Knight. The film was shot at Pinewood Studios and in various locations around London.

Powell's presentation of the material stresses very clearly the links between voyeurism and the act of watching (or even making) films, something portrayed with more subtlety by Alfred Hitchcock in Rear Window (1954). He implicates not only the audience in this "crime", but himself as well, with the use of many POV shots, some visually distorted and grotesque.

In addition, Powell put himself physically into the film, playing Mark's father in the sequences of old home movies, also featuring members of his family. In Mark's workshop, vintage cameras seen in the background are owned by Powell. The art direction was by Arthur Lawson, a Powell veteran like Brian Easdale, the musical score composer.

Before the film was even released, it was heavily cut by the British film board for what was deemed as gratuitous sex and violence. The press and critical reception was extremely negative, with many writers appalled and offended, some calling for it to be removed from theatres on grounds of indecency. Powell's career in the UK was virtually destroyed, and he would spend the next 10 years making films elsewhere in Europe and in Australia.

In the late 1970s, Martin Scorsese, heavily influenced by the work of Powell, funded a re-release of the film in order to reach a wider audience, and a full reappraisal of his work followed. The directors became friends and Powell would later marry Scorsese's editor Thelma Schoonmaker. Peeping Tom is now regarded as a landmark work in British and horror cinema.

Running time is approx. 100 minutes.