Very well executed

Undescribable Perfection

Best movie ever!

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Peeping Tom succeeds in creating a portrait of a vicious killer but at the same time does not abandon our sympathy for him. It's a little dated now. The writing is clunky, the accent a little distracting. But it remains impactful even today.

And that's the essence of cinema...Basically, Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" is about a voyeur, but it doesn't just portray voyeurism as the mental illness of the main protagonist Mark Lewis, played by Carl Boehm, it also provides disturbing glimpses of his childhood where he was the object before becoming the subject. The film ventures in the realms of Freudian psychology and ends up being an extraordinary character study where the understanding of his Peeping Tom habits converge with the understanding of the essence of cinema. Film-making is all about the size of the scope, and whether you take the big or the small one, "Peeping Tom" never ceases to amaze.Now, a camera is a window to a person, it provides us an access we all long for in reality whether from the keyhole or behind sunglasses. Once there 's something that is hidden from our eyes, the challenge is to catch it, and when hidden rhymes with forbidden, there's twice more excitement. To give you an example, I'm a foot fetishist, and when a beautiful woman is sitting in front of me, she takes my eyes down as a form of discretion, while I'm just adjusting my sight to the right spot. I don't feel guilty inasmuch as I believe that everyone's got a fetish or a reason to be peeping.And cinema is simply about providing the perfect medium for a voyeurism that goes to the common denominator. Watching people in their intimate interactions puts us on a form of pedestal where for once, we forget about our reality, the one that enslaves us, to become the master eye, the Big Brother who watches. We can't change the story, that's the limit of our power, but we're powerful in the sense that we know nothing will ever happen to us, that's the edge we have, and that's the edge Mark Lewis has. That he's an aspiring filmmaker is no surprise, the filmmaker is also named the director, he's a God-like figure who catches his victim at the very instant of their death. But there's more.Mark, named after the screenwriter Leo Marks, never gets rid of his camera, which not only reinforces its status as a weapon but as something of a phallic value, like the source of a predator's power, aroused by his prey's powerlessness. The film opens with a murder seen in POV but in the next scene, we understand the roots of Mark's fantasies. There's no exhibition because the exhibitor is flattered over being a fantasy, but the excitement of Mark is to do what he does against his subject's will. This is why, of all the crimes, the most disturbing is the one that starts with a shooting and gradually turns into murder.This moment, starring an unforgettable Moira Shearer, is not only shocking but pivotal because it asserts the other form of perversity induced by the camera, it might show things we'd love to see, but it can also show the total opposite, murder, crime, violence. In reality we can close our eyes, turn our head, but that's the catch with cinema, it catches your eyes, but sometimes it makes your eye catch disturbing realities. "Peeping Tom" is a film of great artistic excellence but then it reaches heights of intelligence by submitting to our eyes the little voyeuristic games we love to play with ourselves and the trashy, sordid part of us. Never had another film toyed so masterfully with my emotions since "Man Bites Dog".And "Peeping Tom" has often been compared with its counterpart of the same year "Psycho", and "Psycho" made me think of what Hitchcock said to Truffaut about his preference for blonde uptight Nordic girls; they were volcanoes inside, Hitch loved to play with paradoxes, with people being well-spoken and educated only to hide mountains of sexual contradictions. "Peeping Tom" does highlight this tendency of British society and this might be the reason the film was trashed by the critics, and trashed is an understatement... maybe it confronted uptight pompousness to its trashy subconscious. Hitch wouldn't screen "Psycho" to the press to avoid similar backlash and the rest is history.And not the happiest one, Powell could never make movies again and if it wasn't for the film's revival driven by the New Hollywood generation, Martin Scorsese and Bertrand Tavernier, "Peeping Tom" wouldn't have lived a renaissance, and we might have missed its subversive intelligence and the pinnacle of Michael Powell's artistry. Artistry isn't just a word, you couldn't direct a more difficult film, one that shows crimes from the killer's perspective, then from the way they're shot by the camera and finally, from our perspective. It's a three-dimensionality of perceptions, one layer more disturbing than another.Mark was named after the screenwriter, and Powell played Mark's father in the footage, responsible for some of the most shocking conduct against a kid to be ever shown on a movie, that Powell's son played the son eliminates any doubt about the film's being a symbolization of the most pervert yet subversively brilliant aspect of film-making.And with the help of two great performances from Carl Boehm, soft-spoken, shy, handsome and crazy, the delightful Anna Massey who embodies our curiosity and her mother, Maxine Audley our suspicion, the film swings back and forth between the delights of watching and the horrors, the joy and the shock, the fascinating character study and introspection into the roots of voyeurism and the heart-pounding pioneer of slasher films, driven by an unforgettable jazzy tempo.Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" accomplishes something that has probably no equivalent in the history of cinema: it captures all in one film the two diametrically opposed applications of cinema or to be more technical, the eye of a camera. Indeed, it captures the soul of voyeurism by showing us that a camera can work as a double-edged sword... almost literally.

This film that, so loathed by everyone in 1960 that it effectively ended the film career of a prestigious director, feels a good decade ahead of it's time. It seems a bit puzzling at first that "Psycho" could be released in the same year and be a success for Hitchcock, and that this film would ruin Powell, but it makes sense when you really look closely at the films. Hitchcock's film has shocking content, but the shocks have a somewhat safe and innocuous character to them. Hitchcock wouldn't really delve into the sort of perverse and unseemly violence you find in this film until "Frenzy", over a decade later. Powell's film delves into the mix of sex, voyeurism and violence that De Palma would delve into in the 70's and 80's, and while this is not simply "a De Palma film made 20 years earlier" (it's less slick, but also a bit more artful), the comparison shows why it took so long for anyone to appreciate this film.

This wonderfully creepy 1960 horror film predates Psycho by about 3 months and predates the "slasher" film by about 16 years and, in braving new ground which deviated from the Gothic Horror film movement spawned by Hammer Films in 1957, helped move horror from the Gothic castles to the house next door. Michael Powell's film presents us with a young man who is so fascinated by the subject of fear, that he stalks young women and kills them while filming their deaths with his movie camera. In to the young man's world, comes a young woman who only wants to understand him and love him, but will she find out his horrible secret before its too late? However, on a cerebral level, Peeping Tom retains its capacity to disturb. Rarely has a film depicted the process of a killer being created so chillingly, nor the manner in which such individuals are capable of conflicted, dualistic personalities. Consider how many serial killers have been described to be charming and kind by others who knew them (Dennis Nilsen or Ted Bundy for example).The scenes showing this transition from shy man-child to confident killer are masterful, with Carl Boehm overcoming other more obvious limitations in his casting (the accent mainly) to portray this aspect unerringly. Peeping Tom has been an incredibly influential film for today's filmmakers, as its influences can be seen in films from Road to Perdition to Red Dragon. I highly recommend it to any fan of film and film history.Overall rating: 8 out of 10.