Peeping Tom (1960), Powell

I'm really not a fan of Michael Powell's stuff. I have an intense dislike for The Red Shoes that can only be explained by some repressed childhood trauma or by the fact it's a rubbish film. In Peeping Tom, Mark Lewis (Karl Heinz Böhm), the shy photographer, psychologically tortured by his father throughout childhood in order to pad out a couple of research papers, hasn't repressed anything - in fact he has a handy archive of dad's experiments to which he continues to add.

It's an interesting and engaging film with some great characters (and some terrible two-dimensional ones), and the weird mystery of why someone born and brought up in London would have such a strong German accent. Or even more strangely, why no one in the entire film would comment on it. It's not as good a film as Psycho which was released the same year, but I'd happily argue that  Karl Heinz Böhm makes a far more likable and sympathetic serial killer than Anthony Perkins.

Comments

[Lee]

I kinda like this movie - i like the idea of a world where genteel, somewhat impoverished middle-class young ladies aren't really that bothered that their potential boyfriends are quite obviously serial killers, not even accidental ones. Although it is a little rough on the not-so-middle class ladies.

Mark - that's a kinda Germanic name, no? - is the son of a psychologist, psychologists are all German - maybe Austrian - it's a well known fact. What worries me a little more than his accent is the shade of his foundation.
I had a thing for anthony perkins as a child, not for mr Boot's Comestic Counter 1983 here...

[Josie]

I really like it when he asks the investigating psychologist if his condition (some weird, killing version of scopophilia) is curable, and the guy says "Oh yes - a complete cure is possible in two to three years" and Mark is crest fallen because he can't be bothered to wait that long. In the real world he would have taken the cure and then lived off the money he got from sueing the phychologist when it failed to work.

[Leon]

I walk through Newman Passage every day where it was filmed and often think of that mirror on the camera. That was soo ingenious and chilling.

http://moblog.co.uk/view.php?id=3209

Leon