Criterion Collection, Home Vision Cinema (DVD), ASIN 0780022629
The very premise of the film will call up comparisons to Hitchcock. A cameraman wishes to film subjects' faces at their most afraid -- the moment of their death. Where Rear Window measured the viewer's voyeurism, Peeping Tom derives its creeps from its measure of the ordinary people who (would) take pleasure in filming the act of murder.

Peeping Tom destroyed the reputation of its director Michael Powell (The Red Shoes). Powell instinctively showed colors as hyper-bright and almost hyper-exposed illuminations of artistic temperaments that would sacrifice everything for art. Whereas Hitchcock, in his films, never allowed the camera to so sweatily focus and interrogate his subjects or his scenes.

Critics in 1960 had just begun the lionization of Hitchcock. Where Hitchcock merely confined Jimmy Stewart, Powell's entire film swelters in claustrophobic camera glare. Every color wilts. Every ray of every hue seems to beat and pulse like a guilty, drumming heart beneath the floorboards -- from the very first scene featuring a furtive customer to the last with its unimaginably cruel yet rich twist.

The anti-hero of Peeping Tom even bucks the Nietzschean Superman anti-hero 1950s Hitchcock championed. The characters in Strangers on a Train and Rope see themselves as giants, too large to care either about murder or the processes of the crime. Belittled by a father who saw his child as a lab rat for analysis correlating fear and nervous system reaction, Peeping Tom's Karlheinz Bohm subtly incorporates many believable tics and mannerisms in a performance of fearsome magnitude. Notice the accidental blurring of the mother in her single scene in these flashbacks. For subtlety, the filmmakers get a 15 out of 10. Mom didn't preen at all. Just a little blur. Just the right touch.

Paradoxically trapped by process himself, the murderer in Peeping Tom sees his victims as subjects. His murders must accompany not only filming, he must see a person's fear before he can film and kill them.

He went through several takes to capture the right face, just as the director of the film-within-the-film haggles with the Julia Roberts-like lead actress to nail each and every take exactly. Lewis compulsively films EVERYTHING, feeling naked without his camera as a writer feels naked without the pen.

This film deserves as much as championing as Rear Window received in the 1960s. The newly released DVD adds to the film's luster by giving the viewer a truer sense of Powell's remarkable use of color.

Michael Pacholski

Michael Pacholski's poem, "Winter Scene," was published in the February 2002 issue of Midwest Review.

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