Essential Cinema: Peeping Tom at the Music Box

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Nov 11, 2010 8:40PM

Despite the fact that we have been on a Michael Powell kick lately, it is somewhat bittersweet to recommend this weekend’s screening of one of his greatest films. Not because there is anything wrong with the film, as Peeping Tom is a genuinely great one, but because it was so controversial and reviled upon its release that it basically ended Powell’s career. The movie was scandalous then, and even today it retains its ability to shock.

Peeping Tom tells the story of a serial killer who films the terrified final moments of his victims using a portable camera with a sharpened tripod leg. A grisly tale to be sure, but it is through a masterful mix of cinematic registers that it achieves something truly unsettling. Using the saturated color palette of a romance and eschewing entirely any pretext of a “whodunit” mystery component, viewers are left with very little in between them and their own awareness of the prurience of their fascination with the spectacle.

Carl Boehm plays a the soft-spoken murderer, who works as a cameraman and moonlights as a pornographer when not inventing the snuff film genre. A quasi-sympathetic portrayal of the killer, whose childhood was one long sadistic experiment by his father (the young killer and his father were even portrayed by Powell’s son and Powell himself) reinforce the unavoidable equivalences made between the killer’s desire to watch death scenes and the audience’s own. It is a movie that puts its viewer on the hot seat, confronting the male gaze, voyeurism and the cinematic obsessions with sex and death without flinching.

Peeping Tom as a film is an equal of its cinematic sibling, Hitchcock’s Psycho (released a few months later). Instead of catapulting Powell’s career, the movie scandalized critics and audiences alike and was shown sparsely until Martin Scorcese (who introduced the film at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts just last week) and a few others campaigned for its retrieval from ignominy. It is a work of ferocious and uncompromising vision that contains within it a pre-emptive commentary on the subsequent 50 years of horror movies while being as creepy as any of them. No mean feat.

Peeping Tom plays Saturday and Sunday at 11:30 am at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.