Peeping Tom (1960)
 In
the year that Hitchcock made Psycho, Michael Powell created
another deviant killer.
But this one lived in London, and as well as trashing our
cheery wartime image of a nation united, Peeping Tom
implicated the audience in its voyeurism, which didn't go down too
well.
At least killer Carl Boehm (real name Karlheinz Böhm) is
German, but his twisted mind and unsettling modus operandi were at
odds with Powell's reputation as a purveyor off sophisticated
Britishness.
The story begins following the murder of a prostitute, Mark
Lewis (Boehm) films onlookers' faces from across the street. Helen
Stephens and her blind mother live in the flat below Mark and Mrs
Stephens senses something odd about the boy.
Mark shows Helen film of himself as a child with his father, a
scientist studying the psychology of fear.
 Helen
is appalled at the film, which shows the child's terrified
reactions to his father's experiments.
Later, at the deserted film studio where Mark works, he
pretends to make a screen test of Vivian but instead films her
murder and hides the body, recording the horrified reactions to
its discovery the next day during rehearsals.
Learning that Mark is the son of the famous Professor Lewis,
Inspector Gregg has him followed.
That night, Milly is murdered at the studio where Mark
photographs models for 'art' magazines and the police head for his
home where Helen has just discovered the film of Vivian's
murder.
Mark tells Helen how he kills his victims, using the sharpened
leg of his camera tripod while focusing a mirror on their faces so
that they can see their own fear.
Realising he cannot escape, Mark secures his camera to the wall
to film his own suicide.
 The
police discover him dead, stabbed like the others - the room
filled with the long ago tape-recorded sound of his father telling
him not to be frightened.
Peeping Tom received an astounding amount of abuse from
critics, with The Times virtually alone in not condemning
the film.
Derek Hill in Tribune said "The only really
satisfactory way to dispose of (the film) would be to shovel it up
and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer".
By the time of its US release two years later, Peeping Tom
had been cut from 109 minutes to 86, with European released
versions also suffering cuts.
Still, it was worshipped by later viewers such as Scorsese,
Coppola and Almodóvar.
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