PEEPING TOM
Looking for trouble
▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1960 | 15 | Blu-ray (4K/regular)/DVD
▶ Director Michael Powell
▶ Cast Carl Boehm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley
BLU-RAY DEBUT This Freudian horror thriller practically ended Michael Powell’s career. While by modern standards it seems pretty tame, you can understand why. Critics were not ready for its portrait of a compulsive voyeur, set amid a seedy Soho milieu of glamour photography – all peeling wallpaper and bruised-skinned models – least of all from the director of films like The Red Shoes and A Matter Of Life And Death.
Austrian Carl Boehm seems strange casting as the decidedly English Mark, driven to film the women he kills with a blade hidden in a camera leg. He excels in the role though, providing flashes of menace but also attracting our sympathy. A psychologist father who treated him like a lab rat is framed as the source of Mark’s hang-ups, and as the painfully shy focus-puller develops a friendship with an innocent neighbour, you can almost convince yourself of the possibility of redemption.