PEEPING TOM (67)

Directed by: Michael Powell (1960)

Starring: Carl Boehm, Anna Massey, Moira Shearer, Maxine Audley

The Pitch: Traumatised by a childhood in which he was constantly tormented - and his reactions filmed - by his scientist father, an aspiring film-maker is also a serial killer who likes to photograph the fear on his victims' faces as he kills them.

Theo Sez: Easy to feel superior about the horrified reaction this provoked back in 1960 (most famously critic Derek Hill's assertion that it should be "flushed swiftly down the nearest sewer"), but there is actually something deeply unclean about it ; maybe it's the cheap, splotchy colour (you feel it'd come off on your fingers if you ran your hand down it), maybe the way it draws everything out - half of it seems to be uncomfortable pauses and the anti-hero's tormented face as he wrestles with his secret. It goes way beyond tension, feels as though we're wallowing in someone's pain - which of course is exactly the point (i.e. it's exactly what he does with his victims), though it's a bit ingenuous to infer that films therefore make sadistic voyeurs of us all (just because this particular film is shot in a sadistic way). In fact, the more academic aspects seem a little half-baked, just the thing for academics looking for something to dissect and develop but rather distracting for the general viewer ; what's more interesting is the hero's pathology, with the camera symbolising his father's warped love (you might say he kills out of an Oedipal sense of competition), his victims standing in for his filmed / abused childhood self as well as the stepmother he despised (her lack of love reflected in her incompetence behind a camera - she can't even shoot a film in focus) : there's a striking moment where he and the camera are on opposite edges of the frame (it's being examined by a policeman) and he reaches out for it clumsily, as if yearning for all it represents. Above all, though, it's the mix of higher purpose and horror-film garishness that's so unusual - this is basically a dank, tawdry B movie of broad strokes and crude effects (down to the casting of a German actor as "Mark Lewis", our very British psycho) : "Don't let me see you looking frightened," pleads the hero of his beloved, knowing he'll kill her if she does, sounding like a terrified vampire at the crack of dawn. Quite intriguing, but the word "masterpiece" - implying polish and maturity - seems all wrong somehow.