Defining Favourites: Peeping Tom (1960)

In 1960, this film destroyed Michael Powell's career. Now, it's seen as a masterpiece.

image via Janus Films

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Directed by Michael Powell
Screenplay by Leo Marks
Produced by Michael Powell
Starring Karlheinz Böhm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley
Release Date: April 7, 1960
Running Time: 101 minutes

In 1960, Michael Powell released Peeping Tom and nearly tanked his reputation as a filmmaker. But even with the film’s reception having been so hyperbolically negative at the time, one cannot deny that Peeping Tom has indeed achieved its goals, inciting a sort of shock that might have felt alien to the sensibilities of audiences of the time. But Michael Powell also saw that these impulses when making perfect art are not that alien, given the reputation that he had managed to establish along with Emeric Pressburger for so many years – and could very well have been deadly at that. For all we know, this aspect to Peeping Tom might have indeed resulted in a far more prescient film than what was seen first and foremost in here.

When Peeping Tom starts, the camera lingers on a call girl, who prepares to take the unseen cameraman up to her room. But of course, the camera acts as a voyeur – something we’ve already accustomed ourselves to via Hitchcock. But our camera can only follow this woman so far before we see a look of fear on her face, as if near death. And then the film makes a hard cut to a camera projecting everything we had just seen on celluloid. This poor woman is dead, but the camera lingers on her final moments, replicating our voyeuristic interest in her.