How the film that scandalised Sixties Britain is now acclaimed as a masterpiece
The outcry over Peeping Tom wrecked its director’s career and left him penniless — yet he inspired a stellar new generation of film-makers from Scorsese to Spielberg
IF EVER a film was ahead of its time, it was British director Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. It came out in 1960, a year in which cinema-goers were more accustomed to a diet of endless war films, romantic melodramas and — from America — John Wayne westerns.
And so a movie centred on a serial killer, who filmed the terror of his victims in their final moments as he stabbed them repeatedly with a blade secreted in his camera tripod, was always going to challenge audiences.
Throw in a good dose of psychological torture, a shocking level of female nudity and a grisly suicide and you have a recipe for critical outrage.
Within 24 hours of the premiere in London, Peeping Tom became Britain’s most controversial and reviled film.
Powell was branded a sadist and pervert, and critics said his film should be flushed ‘ swiftly down the nearest sewer’.
One was so outraged he wrote: ‘neither the hopeless leper colonies of East Pakistan, the back streets of Bombay nor the gutters of Calcutta has left me with such feelings of nausea and depression as . . . Peeping Tom.’
Within days, it had been withdrawn from cinemas and Powell, until then the revered auteur of classics such as The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter Of Life And Death (1946), Black narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), was cast into the outer darkness.
But in the decades that followed, Peeping Tom’s qualities were re-evaluated and it is now widely considered a masterpiece. The British Film Institute named it the 78th greatest British film of all time and, in 2017, a Time Out magazine poll of 150 actors, directors, writers, producers and critics ranked it the 27th best British film.
AND now, a carefully restored version has been released in multiple formats, including DVD and Blu-Ray. So what explains this extraordinary reversal of fortune?
Much of the credit for Powell’s rehabilitation — 34 years after his death at 84 in 1990 — can be attributed to a Hollywood director who watched The Red Shoes when he was nine and never forgot the experience.
Martin Scorsese, no stranger to extreme violence in his own movies such as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, initially thought Powell was a pseudonym, but tracked him down in 1975 living ‘beyond broke’ in a freezing cottage in Gloucestershire.
A man long accustomed to a 5pm whisky was too poor even to afford his daily dram and was having to chop his own firewood to provide a minimal level of heating.
When Scorsese came to Britain for the Edinburgh film festival to promote Taxi Driver, a mutual contact arranged a meeting with Powell at a London restaurant.
‘He was very quiet and didn’t quite know what to make of me,’ Scorsese recalled later. ‘I had to explain to him that his work was a great source of inspiration for a whole new generation of filmmakers — myself, Spielberg, Paul Schrader, [Francis Ford] Coppola, [Brian] De Palma.’
Powell went on to become Scorsese’s adviser, encouraging him not to compromise on his vision of his Mafia classic Goodfellas, with its extreme violence and drug-taking, no matter how many studios rejected it.
Even after more than 60 years, Peeping Tom still has the capacity to shock. The plot revolves around a fictional film technician called Mark Lewis, played by German actor Carl Boehm, who has a side hustle taking pornographic photos.
After hours, he murders women while filming their contorted faces and dying gasps, and uses the footage to compile his own snuff movies, long before the term became used. But we are also drawn into his complex mindset, as Lewis reveals his twisted upbringing at the hands of a sadistic father.
After meeting his neighbour Helen, who lives in the downstairs flat with her blind mother, he shows her black-and-white homemovies, filmed by his psychologist father, of the young Lewis being subjected to traumatic episodes as a child in order to further his research. This included filming him at his mother’s death bed, with his father capturing his distress.
In fact, he was under observation at all times as — in a chilling foreshadowing of the ubiquitous webcam — spy cameras had been set up all over the family home.
At one point, we see Lewis screen his snuff movie while Helen’s mother is in his apartment and she realises how disturbed he is. Helen herself then watches one of the films, but Lewis cannot bring himself to kill his would-be girlfriend in order to keep his secret.
Those looking for Freudian parallels between Powell and Lewis will be disappointed to learn that the director’s father was a hop farmer, not a psychologist.
Powell cast himself as Lewis’s father and his own son, Columba, played the young Lewis — that is as far as the parallels went.
One critic observed: ‘In Peeping Tom, [Powell’s] self-exposure goes even further. He not only plays the sadistic father, but uses his own child as the victim.’
Powell’s third wife Thelma Schoonmaker — Scorsese’s longtime cinematographer — has dismissed this interpretation, arguing: ‘I don’t think that crossed Michael’s mind . . . he didn’t take it so seriously. He thought: “This is a good idea, Columba will be a good actor, and it’ll be fun for us to make together.” I don’t think that he expected the storm of reaction.’
Columba Powell, now 72, says: ‘Everyone thinks I should be traumatised by it, but it was a movie, and real life was different.’
But the casting was not the only overlap between fiction and fact, because Michael Powell, the future director, was also an obsessive film-maker at home. He relentlessly catalogued family life with his second wife, Frankie, and two sons.
UNLIKE the introspective psychopath Lewis, however, Powell was no shrinking violet. After turning his back on a banking career, he pursued a career in the film industry with relentless drive.
After taking on various backroom roles, he began working on Alfred Hitchcock’s early British movies in the late 1920s.
By the 1930s, Powell was directing his own lowbudget films, but his big break came in 1939 when he met the exiled Hungarian screenwriter and producer Emeric Pressburger.
In 1943, the pair made The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp, starring Deborah kerr, and, five years later, he and Pressburger earned a best picture Oscar nomination for The Red Shoes.
By the mid-1950s, however, the two men were drifting apart professionally, and more than one critic has speculated that it was the absence of Pressburger’s insight that explains Powell’s decision to make Peeping Tom.
Powell struggled to put together the film’s meagre £125,000 budget but, bizarrely, the Carry On financier nat Cohen stepped in, probably drawn by the film’s apparently raunchy material. He would live to rue the day he did so.
Cohen and Powell were not the only ones to suffer from the backlash. Carl Boehm never made another English-language film.
By contrast Anna Massey — who played Helen — went onto have a distinguished career. But if Powell was embittered, it did not show.
Whatever its faults, Powell’s Peeping Tom painted a picture of what was to come.
With its garish Technicolor, and film-within-a-film premise, Peeping Tom spelled the end of the buttoned- down post-war studio system and its strict moral code.
In the end, the irony of its rehabilitation as a screen classic was not lost on Powell, who wrote in his autobiography: ‘I make a film that nobody wants to see and then, 30 years later, everybody has either seen it or wants to see it.’