Subversive at the time, mild today, January 6, 2004

By	Jeffrey Leach (Omaha, NE USA) - See all my reviews

Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) spends his days working the cameras at a film studio and his nights moonlighting as pin-up photographer and documentarian. He always carries a camera wherever he goes, photographing seemingly mundane objects as buildings and people. Lewis seems like a harmless sort of chap, but the dark secrets swirling in his mind would give the stoutest soul pause. He is a Peeping Tom, always gazing into windows or using his camera to spy on the intimate details of other people's lives. His illness seems to come from his childhood, when his famous psychologist father used Mark as a test subject in his work on human fears. Father would set up a camera in different rooms of the house, along with a tape recorder, and proceed to torment his son in various ways in order to monitor the boy's reaction. At some point in the proceedings, young Mark equated women with his terror fits, and as a full grown man he has decided to conduct his own amateur experiments. With camera and tripod firmly in tow, Lewis tricks women into situations where he can murder them and record their fear on celluloid. His first victim is a woman of the night, the next a would be actress at the studio. Mark initially gets away with his crimes because he blends easily into the background. He's polite to a fault, quiet in manner and movement, and solitary. He spends most of his time in the huge dark room at his house, endlessly replaying his sordid film footage and anguishing over his painful childhood.

Enter Helen Stephens (Anna Massey), an aspiring author and tenant in Lewis's house. Young Stephens notices Mark when she sees him staring into her apartment during her birthday party. Intrigued, Helen follows Lewis up to his apartment, discovers he owns the house and acts as its landlord, and witnesses some of his bizarre behavior. Despite the uneasiness of their first meeting, Mark and Helen become fast friends. In fact, Lewis takes such a shine to Helen that the mere idea of "photographing" her--code for committing another murder--shocks him to the very marrow of his being. Helen really likes this man even though her blind, alcoholic mother despises young Lewis because she has an intuition that he is up to no good. Things begin to turn south for Mark when the police launch an investigation into the murders, Helen's mother confronts him about his activities, and he learns that his little problem will take years of therapy to overcome. Lewis loses his cool as the authorities close in but discovers a peace of sorts during the film's conclusion.

Modern audiences will scratch their heads as they try to figure out why "Peeping Tom" was so controversial when it first came out. I think the primary reason this movie shocked British moviegoers and critics concerns how the movie presents such an appalling criminal as a figure worthy of sympathy and outright pity. No one wants to feel for a murderer of young women, but Powell's movie often gives Boehm's character endearing traits. When Helen comes to Mark requesting his aid with the photographs in her soon to be published book, Lewis visibly enthuses that anyone would honor him with such a request. The guy is genuinely happy about Helen's success, and further confounds audience perceptions by buying her a very nice brooch for her birthday. He gives her this gift not as a means for tricking her into a situation where he can victimize her, but because he likes her, respects her, and wants her to be happy. There are a few other reasons why "Peeping Tom" scandalized the British film industry, probably reasons best left unelaborated on here, but the film's refusal to judge Mark Lewis's behavior is probably the biggest reason for the insults heaped on this picture.

I liked the film even though it is a relatively bloodless affair. Carl Boehm's performance as the tortured Mark Lewis provides the primary impetus for viewing this film. He captures perfectly the concept of a scared, tormented little boy wrapped in a man's body. Hats off to Criterion as well; they did a grand job with the widescreen picture transfer and the heap of extras included on the disc. There's a stills gallery, a trailer for the film, a lengthy documentary about screenwriter Leo Marks, and a commentary by one of those hoity-toity film historians. Don't go into this movie looking for a gory thriller. What you will find is a colorful, quiet movie about a very disturbed young man looking for a way out of his personal darkness.

A VERY British psycho indeed, December 16, 2002

By	Paul Fogarty "Hopeless film addict!" (LA, United States) - See all my reviews

The film is difficult to categorize; thriller, drama, psychological horror, romance... to some extent it's all of the above, but I guess I'd say it's closest to a psychological horror/thriller film. But be warned, you'll find no unstoppable cyborg killers, no chainsaw wielding crazies, no killer aliens bleeding acid, or teenagers being sliced `n' diced ad nauseum; if that's what you want, there're endless films, both good and bad, that will do the job. No, "Peeping Tom" deals with the desperate, abject "horror," that is born of a tortured human soul.

The film certainly doesn't hang around, and gets right down to business from the opening scene, which has the main character, a film technician named Mark Lewis, played by Karlheinz (Carl) Bohm, stalking and killing his first victim, one of London's many "streetwalkers." This opening scene sets the tone for most of the rest of the film, a feeling of seedy desperation.

Mark keeps it together in his everyday life, but he is horribly psychologically damaged by the "research" his father, a famed doctor of psychology, carried out on him as a child, and desperately driven to act out his own twisted revenge on those around him. Mark's father was researching the effects of fear on the human psyche, and used his own son as a clinical guinea pig throughout his childhood; now the child is grown, and driven by his own internal demons to complete his fathers work.

But Mark wants to take his fathers work one step forward, not only is he obsessed with `fear', but he is consumed with the idea of "seeing" it, of "capturing" the face of fear with his camera, as if somehow that will bring him the ultimate understanding. And so it is that he sets out to murder Women, and films their last moments as he does so, creating his own "snuff movies," that he watches over and over again in his darkened apartment, desperately looking for something that only he can see.

And while he's not working in a film studio, Mark earns a little extra on the side by shooting porno pics in a room over a newsagents! This actually leads to what is probably the only deliberately comical scene in the whole film, when Mark reports for `work' one evening, only to find an elderly gentleman in the shop perusing the special "views" that are for sale, "under the counter." There is a second scene in the film that raises a wry grin; Mark is in the street filming the police investigating his murder of the prostitute. A man walks up to him, and assuming he's a reporter, asks him what paper he works for, "Oh, The Observer," Mark replies with a knowing smile.

But Mark's life is not all horror and desperation; into it comes love and happiness in the shape of a girl, Helen Stevens, played by Anna Massey, who lives downstairs in his building. Helen is an ingenue, an innocent, in every sense of the word. She lives with her blind mother, and is as far removed from Mark's worlds, both his professional one at the studio and the porn operation "after hours," and his internal nightmare existence, as it is possible to be.

He opens up to her, and in a moment of trust, of empathy, shares with her a glimpse of his tortured childhood, by showing her some the film his father took of HIM, while he carried out his research! How can Mark reconcile these two worlds? Will he choose to live in the light with Helen, or will he be cast into horrifying darkness and damnation by his internal demons, driven to take ever greater risks in his quest to "see" what he so desperately needs to see; will Helen herself, or her mother, be sacrificed to this end?!

Karlheinz Bohm's performance as Mark is wonderful; he's a monster, he was MADE a monster by his own father, he knows it, but he's a monster all the same, only, he doesn't WANT to be a monster! And herein lies the "problem" with "Peeping Tom;" Mark is an incredibly sympathetic character! We the audience are aware of all this, and yet we want Mark to change, to be happy with Helen, to help her with the children's book she's writing, but he's a killer of Women, and worse, he's driven to kill time and time again. There's a scene where he `toys' with one of his victims on a studio soundstage that reminded me of the way a cat will `play' with a bird or mouse before moving in for the kill. An incredible, cold-blooded performance by Bohm.

It's difficult, if not impossible, to view the film NOW, with the sensibilities of those who watched when it came out in the early 60's. The film opened to a roaring, and unanimous, tide of disgust and revulsion on the part of the London critics, and was pulled from the cinema circuit within a week of its release. One of the worst reviews went as follows; "The only really satisfactory way to dispose of "Peeping Tom" would be to shovel up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Even then the stench would remain!"

The film was "lost" for nearly 20 years, before being rediscovered by the likes of Martin Scorsese. This is still a somewhat uncomfortable film to watch, and the last 10 minutes or so, when Mark realizes the game is up, have lost none of their power to chill.