“THE BRITISH PSYCHO”

By Raymond Benson

The acclaimed filmmaker Michael Powell, who had enjoyed a magnificent ten-year collaboration with producer/writer Emeric Pressburger between 1941-1951 (they were known as “The Archers), set off on his own in the remainder of the 50s. His career was unfairly and abruptly cut short, in Britain at least, with the release of Powell’s 1960 feature, Peeping Tom.

The UK premiere of Peeping Tom occurred just three months before the US premiere of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and in many ways Powell’s movie was a preview of what was to come from “The Master of Suspense”. Many film historians have called Peeping Tom the “British Psycho” because the picture deals with a serial killer, it contains shocking sequences, and there are themes of psychoanalysis and kinky sexual obsessions in the movie’s DNA, just like its American counterpart.

But the two films cannot be more different.

For one thing, Peeping Tom lacks the dark humor that Hitchcock laced throughout Psycho. Hitchcock himself had referred to his movie as a “comedy,” even though it’s now considered one of the greatest horror films ever made. Secondly, Psycho is immensely suspenseful, edge-of-the-seat stuff, and it’s a wild ride at the cinema. It was one heck of an entertaining piece of celluloid, and it still is. Peeping Tom, on the other hand, takes itself very seriously, is more of a slow burn, and concentrates more on the killer in terms of human flaws. Whereas Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates at first seems to be a nervous, introverted mama’s boy who deserves our empathy—until he doesn’t!—Carl Boehm’s Mark Lewis (“Carl Boehm” was the screen name at the time for German/Austrian actor Karlheinz Böhm) is a character who wants the audience’s sympathy from the get-go and all the way through to the character’s tragic ending.

Mark Lewis was raised by a sadistic psychoanalyst father (who is portrayed uncredited by director Michael Powell himself, and young Mark is played by Powell’s son, Columba Powell, also uncredited). Dr. Lewis was fascinated by the emotion fear. He performed years of “experiments” on his son to test the boy’s own fear, often filming the results for posterity. Mark grew up psychologically scarred, but he also became a talented and prolific cameraman. His day job is that of a focus-puller for a British film studio, but by night he indulges in his own personal filmmaking—that of making “snuff” films of women he first frightens in order to film their reactions, and then murders while the camera’s still rolling. He then spends hours in his makeshift dark room and home cinema running the films for his private pleasure. Some of these women include actress/dancer Vivian (Moira Shearer) and model Milly (Pamela Green). When Mark is befriended by his downstairs neighbor, Helen (Anna Massey), he desires to open up to her about his particular perversion. To reveal more would spoil the fun, such as it is.

Okay, one can possibly understand how the very conservative (at the time) British public and critics might have viewed this in-your-face and very adult motion picture in early 1960, which frankly was still the 1950s in sensibilities. Peeping Tom was savaged by the press. The picture played only a week or two before the studio pulled it from cinemas. It didn’t open in the US until 1962, and there it was marketed as an exploitation horror film in only a few theaters in the country. Peeping Tom subsequently disappeared for years, becoming a cult title which few people had actually seen.

Martin Scorsese, as a film student at NYU and burgeoning director in the 1960s, had heard of the movie and was just beginning to discover the works of Powell and Pressburger, but seeing Peeping Tom eluded him until 1970. From then on, Scorsese championed the picture and put forth funds to help get the title re-released. His longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, who eventually married Powell, also joined in with the reappraisals of the movie both in the US and, finally, in the UK. Today, Peeping Tom is considered a masterpiece of psychological horror, one that can favorably be compared to Psycho, if such a comparison must be made.

For this reviewer, Psycho will always be the superior film, but Peeping Tom is a worthwhile cinematic excursion into madness and murder. It is, though, as noted, certainly a different kind of experience.

The Criterion Collection released Peeping Tom on DVD way back in the late 1990s, but the company has now issued the film again in a brand new 4K digital restoration with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. The 2-disk package contains the movie as a 4K UHD disc presented in Dolby Vision HDR, and as a Blu-ray with special features on a second disc. The images look spectacularly crisp and clean, accenting the dark but vibrant coloring of the photography by Otto Heller.

Two audio commentaries can be selected. One features film historian Ian Christie and the other features film scholar Laura Mulvey. Supplements include an introduction by Martin Scorsese; an interview with Thelma Schoonmaker; a documentary about the film’s history featuring Schoonmaker, Scorsese, and actor Böhm; and a documentary about the screenwriter, Leo Marks, who coincidentally was the owner of the London bookstore that was the inspiration for the fictional 84 Charing Cross Road shop; a piece on the film’s restoration; and the theatrical trailer. There are English subtitles for the hearing impaired. An essay by author Megan Abbott adorns the booklet.

Peeping Tom is a slice of British filmmaking that has luckily found its proper place in the legacy of one of that country’s greatest directors. For fans of Michael Powell, horror films, slasher pictures, and British cinema.

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