Bloodtype Online
For the best of the Horror/Cult/Exploitation film experience
Peeping Tom (1960)
Mark
Lewis, awkward boudoir photographer and cameraman for a film studio,
rents out rooms in his father’s sprawling home and obsessively works on
his documentary late into the night. For now, his work is conducted in secret, but soon he will have it exactly right. Soon, he will be able to share his triumph with the entire world.
Perhaps I should back up to the very beginning and explain the subject of Mark’s work. Mark
uses his own camera and projector and struggles against the ephemeral
qualities of light, struggles with subjects he cannot fully control, to
capture his obsession. Our first introduction to Mark is largely confusing. He remains unseen, behind a camera lens, filming a prostitute. He makes us into voyeurs, whether we like it or not. We are forced to watch him hire her and follow her up the stairs to her apartment. We watch her undress and then we watch her scream. We just don’t know why she is so
terrified, but we do know Mark Lewis is a killer and we will be forced to watch his work…like it or not.
On the other hand, Mark is not a vile, sadistic animal. Once
we do meet him, he’s actually pretty dorky and timid—so much so that it
makes you uncomfortable to watch him interact with others. Yet, then again, he can be strong and assured while working at the film studio—perhaps because he is near a camera. He even evokes our sympathy. His father abused him in order to study the expressions of fear in human beings and he got it all on film. Expectedly, Mark defends his father as brilliant. He doesn’t understand why Helen, his tenant and love interest, is so mortified.
Peeping Tom is a disturbing, yet intelligent, film. The voyeur angle is unmistakable and it’s fairly confrontational. At one point Mark lures an aging studio actress to a surreptitious shoot. There
are so many layers of us watching her film him filming…it gets to be
very unsettling, particularly when her role in this charade is to
pretend to be frightened, only she isn’t. Mark asks her to pretend that she is in the presence of a madman. The madman wants to kill her, he says, only she doesn’t know. She agrees that this would be very scary. The scene has a slow, steady discomfort that never quite goes away. We
see it framed in a variety of ways: Powell’s lens, the victim’s camera,
and Mark’s camera, which looks like crosshairs or a window with thick
black lines. She will be scared, he tells her, as long as
she remembers that to the madman, the consequences of killing her are
less important than the deed.
I had never heard of Karlheinz Böhm (billed in this film as Carl Boehm). With
the majority of his work found in German language film and television,
this isn’t surprising, but I’m officially upset with myself for waiting
so long to check out Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. His performance is nothing less than perfect. Mark Lewis is clearly psychotic, but he is a functional psychotic. Böhm’s portrayal is so expert, it is easy to see Mark as nothing more than a socially awkward, painfully shy man. This is despite the fact that we have already seen him kill and we have already seen him film his crimes. I can really only compare his performance to Anthony Perkins’ role as Norman
Bates. Perhaps
it has been easy for the American public to largely overlook Peeping
Tom, Psycho was released the same year, but Mark’s is a much more
complicated type of killer. At times even unaware that his behavior is wrong, so compelled is he to act. For me, Norman is creepy at all times, but Mark almost has a chance at passing for “normal.” He is far more deadly.
Powell’s disturbing film is a classic.
****
-Jennie Milojevic
