Peeping Tom (1960)

Directed by Michael Powell. Starring Carl Boehm, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley, Moira Shearer, Jack Watson, Pamela Green, Shirley Anne Field, Martin Miller, Esmond Knight, Brenda Bruce.

In this voyeuristic proto-slasher, disturbed photog Mark (Boehm) targets women to be his “subjects” of fear, an obsession that grew out of childhood trauma. His twisted world is seen through his camera, as intimate in his hands as a lover, a spiked leg of the tripod his phallic weapon—it’s all very Freudian, of course, pushed to melodramatic extremes through Boehm’s unforgettably creepy yet shy, pitiful and “polite” performance, and the vigorously subjective camerawork (hardly the only layer-upon-layer present in this off-putting yet compelling picture). Massey does fine vulnerable work as well, playing the sympathetic young woman living below the killer who takes an interest (even a liking) to him and his “hobby”. Like Hitchcock’s Psycho from the same year, a first-rate shocker that would be studied and copied relentlessly in the decades after; unlike that movie, however, it would be many years before a reappraisal turned this one into an influential effort in the genre—upon release, the pic was so viciously repudiated by moralistic critics, it effectively ended the career of one of Britain’s best directors. Brian Easdale composed the score.

88/100