Today's random film generator threw up Peeping Tom (1960, Michael Powell, 101 minutes, TMDB rating 7.455). The classic legend goes: a single film buried the career of the man who made The Red Shoes, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and A Canterbury Tale — a titan of British cinema who practically carried the aesthetic of The Archers on his back alone. Beautiful story: genius creates monster, monster devours creator, film-as-Frankenstein. The tale seems well-known, film-studies canon, nothing to dig into.
But the moment you dive into primary sources, the legend starts cracking. The April 7, 1960 premiere was a bloodbath — yes. Powell never made another major film in Britain afterward — yes. But then things get interesting: roughly a third of this story is myth, constructed in hindsight. Distribution continued for two more years, the "explosion" was engineered not just by critics but by a financial system that collapsed before the premiere, and the film itself turned out to be not a horror movie about a maniac with a camera, but something far more audacious — the first film to strike not at its characters, but at whoever sits in the theater.
Decision made: dig in this direction. Not "the story of one failure," but the anatomy of how cinema first turned the camera on the viewer — and what that broke. And along the way — the fate of Karlheinz Böhm, the actor who played the maniac and spent the second half of his life doing the exact opposite.
It started innocently. The script came to Powell from 52-year-old Leo Marks, a man whose biography alone could fuel a thriller: former SOE cryptographer, the one who trained agents and encrypted their radio transmissions in occupied France. According to Powell's recollection, Marks once leaned across a table and asked: "How would you like a film about a young man with a camera who kills the women he photographs?" Powell answered instantly: "That's me. I'd like it very much."
The premiere took place April 7, 1960 in London, distributed by Anglo-Amalgamated — a company specializing in cheap thrills like Horrors of the Black Museum. And the national press rose up with almost military synchronization. Caroline Lejeune of the Observer — Powell's longtime champion — wrote: "I don't think a film has disgusted me more." Derek Hill of the left-wing Tribune delivered the formula still quoted today: "The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer." Len Mosley of the Daily Express compared the film's nauseating qualities to the leper colonies of East Pakistan, the slums of Bombay, and the drains of Calcutta — what exactly he was comparing remains unclear. Monthly Film Bulletin went as far as direct comparison between Powell and the Marquis de Sade.
At the same time — a detail usually omitted — that same April's trade press stood on the opposite shore. Kinematograph Weekly (April 7, 1960) called the film a "first-rate British shocker" and "thoughtful as well as sensational." And by April 28, the same K-W recorded: "A SAVAGELY hostile press didn't prevent Peeping Tom from scoring steadily during its two weeks' stay at the Plaza" — the critical massacre didn't stop the film from filling seats for two weeks in the West End. Moreover, exhibitor Gala Royal on Edgware Road put the critics' vitriolic quotes in their advertising — and Kinematograph Weekly triumphantly noted that "retaliation has paid off" and the film was packing the house.
Why did the press explode like this? The answer is prosaic and terrifying at once: the film struck at the profession. Peeping Tom doesn't give the viewer comfortable distance. It opens with a POV shot — we see the world through Mark's eyes, a sweet stammering focus-puller at a film studio. We understand who he is from the first scene, and still we sit and watch. Half an hour in, we catch ourselves used to the camera-as-weapon, interested in how he films. And at that moment Powell gently shows: wait, the one who films and the one who watches — that's you. Critics, whose profession literally consists of watching others' suffering and writing about it, felt exposed. Alexander Walker later admitted in an interview for the documentary A Very British Psycho that the film "points the finger back at the audience — and perhaps critics felt uniquely targeted, given their profession".
The sharpest formulation of this effect came from Roger Ebert: "The movies make us voyeurs. We sit in the dark, watching other people's lives. That's the bargain the cinema makes with us — only most films are too well-mannered to mention it. Peeping Tom violated the rules and crossed the line." The key scene — Mark's attic hideaway, a private screening room where he replays his "documentary" films over and over: the murder shown in three perspectives — what Mark sees, what the camera "sees," and what the victim saw. Three gazes converge into a single frame, and the viewer discovers themselves inside all three.
Fifteen years later, this optics would get a name — Laura Mulvey in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975) would dissect the mechanism of "male gaze" and return to Peeping Tom as a text that 1960 readers were unable to read: "Its first reviewers failed to see even what was on the surface. Locked in traditions of English realism, they saw an immoral film 'about life,' when the film was an ironic commentary on the mechanics of cinematic looking and identification." The film didn't outpace the viewer — it outpaced the theory capable of reading it.
Myth one: "the film killed Powell's career." Partly true — Powell genuinely never made another major film in Britain. But the chronology is unforgiving: Rank's financial collapse began after Caesar and Cleopatra in 1948, by 1960 the studio was ruled by accountant John Davis, with whom Powell had a years-long conflict (in the film, the antagonist producer is unambiguously named Don Jarvis). Korda's London Films effectively ceased to exist in the mid-1950s — Korda hadn't made anything since 1955 and once screamed at Powell after a fight: "I'll see to it you never work in this country again." Meaning Powell's big British cinema ended before the Peeping Tom premiere. Powell's widow Thelma Schoonmaker puts it more sharply: the film "brought to boiling point simmering resentments" — Powell had insisted on artistic freedom his whole life, accumulated enemies, and Peeping Tom was payback.
Myth two: "the film was rushed out of distribution." Powell himself in his memoirs: producers "cancelled the British release and sold the negative as quickly as possible to some black-market video pirate who tried to forget about it. And it was forgotten, along with the director, for almost twenty years." Beautiful phrase — but distribution archives show the film ran around the country for two more years: the ABC circuit, a Liverpool rerelease in 1962, local ban in exactly one town — Reading, Berkshire. The dramaturgy of exile turned out prettier than bookkeeping.
Myth three: "this is horror." This too is largely myth, and a skillful one. Distributor Anglo-Amalgamated released the film in one package with Horrors of the Black Museum and Circus of Horrors — film historians call this trio the "Sadean trilogy" for their shared distributor and common themes of voyeurism and dismemberment. Posters were blunt, horror-focused. But Powell himself called Peeping Tom not horror but "a film about Freud": murders "face-on" are almost absent, victims' bodies aren't shown at all, plenty of black comedy, and the finale — not a scream but stunned silence. One modern screening attendee, Steve Crook, describes it precisely: "Many laugh in the middle, but at the end — stunned silence." This isn't a slasher that scares — it's a psychological thriller that strips the viewer of anonymity. Modern horror lists (Total Film, 18th place in 2005; Guardian, 10th place in 2010) include it in the horror canon more for DNA than genre.
The Peeping Tom script was written by a cryptographer — and it shows. Leo Marks said: "I wanted to reveal Mark step by step to the audience, as if they themselves were decoding a cipher." The character Mark Lewis is Leo Marks, read backward (Marks had a habit of embedding his name in texts). And more: Marks spent years doing the same thing — watching people be afraid. His SOE work was literally "connoisseur of fear": he evaluated agents at final briefing, knowing many wouldn't return. His sharpest phrase about the film: "Peeping Tom was born in those briefing rooms. I'm convinced all cryptographers are essentially voyeurs."
Powell, in turn, put himself literally into the film. The professor-father is played by the director himself, young Mark by his eight-year-old son Columba, and the dying mother by his own wife Frankie Reidy. Shooting took place in the house where Powell grew up. The famous scene where the scientist-father places a lizard on the sleeping boy's chest was filmed with the son's real fear: "He was frightened, to everyone's consternation, including his own," Powell recalled. "I felt like a murderer, justifiably." And then, with irony that can't be taken from a director with 17 recognized films behind him: "Of course I left the scene in the film. If my son carries a lizard complex into old age — that will be my fault."
Karlheinz Böhm got the role because Powell was looking for a "soft" face: Laurence Harvey was initially planned, but Powell settled on the Austrian — son of a famous conductor, who knew what a domineering father was. And Böhm played that night where Mark kisses not Helen but the camera lens — or rather, kisses her with the same hand Helen touched. It's the film's tenderest and most horrifying scene at once.
Two months after the London premiere of Peeping Tom, in June 1960, Psycho opened in New York — Hitchcock's film about a polite maniac obsessed with his mother. And here things get archaeologically interesting: Hitchcock and Powell were friends from the silent era, Powell in his youth worked for Hitchcock as a photographer on sets, and Hitchcock himself had a unrealized project "The Blind Man" sitting in his desk drawer around that time — about a blind pianist who receives a murdered man's eyes in transplant, and the image of the murder remains in the retina. Two Brits simultaneously developing the same theme.
And Hitchcock drew conclusions from the other's failure lightning-fast. He refused press screenings for critics, built a slow rollout, banned entry to the theater after the film started, and invested in marketing — and Psycho became the biggest box office hit of his career. Powell, by contrast, found himself alone with a panicking distributor. Nat Cohen of Anglo-Amalgamated, according to Walker's testimony, "couldn't wait to rid himself" of the film — because he feared that charges of distributing pornography would prevent him from receiving a knighthood. This isn't cinema anymore, this is career management.
The paradox: of the two films, Peeping Tom turned out more deeply embedded in the genetics of future slashers. Hitchcock's — one victim "by the rules" and then forced adversaries; Powell's — a series of sexually active victims and virginal Helen as "final girl" a decade and a half before Halloween and Black Christmas. Hitchcock's — b&w to hide the blood; Powell's — saturated Eastmancolor where red is already the color of an entire genre. And crucially: Psycho hides the killer until the finale, Peeping Tom — names him from the first scene and forces you to watch through HIS eyes. The killer-POV shot that would become synonymous with slasher through Halloween was invented here.
The next twenty years the film lived in a basement. In the US, Astor Pictures only released it in 1962, in cut form, and it was one of the company's most unsuccessful releases. Italy cut four scenes, Finland banned the film until 1981. Karlheinz Böhm later recalled that after the London premiere, no one came to shake hands with him or Powell. Powell went to Australia, made a couple films, bombed a 55-minute feature for the Children's Film Foundation and "went into the ground" — to Gloucestershire. He lived in near-poverty.
The savior was Martin Scorsese — then a film student, who first saw a cut b&w copy in Alphabet City, and in 1970 found a full uncut 35mm Eastmancolor print at a friend's. In 1978 distributor Corinth Films asked Scorsese for $5,000 for a rerelease — he agreed immediately, and in 1979 the film screened at New York Film Festival to wide success. Scorsese paid for Powell's flight to New York, which he could no longer afford, and brought him to the screening — so he could hear the audience applaud. Vincent Canby in the NYT reacted skeptically — "fashion for new auteurs" — but the fashion could no longer stop the tide.
Powell lived to see his reputation restored — and, in David Thomson's formula, became "cherished Merlin in Scorsese's court." He met Scorsese's editor Thelma Schoonmaker at a dinner and married her in 1984 — those are the same hands that edited Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Killers of the Flower Moon. Powell's widow is the first woman with three editing Oscars, and she still guards her husband's legacy. Dilys Powell, the same one from the Sunday Times, publicly recanted in 1994 and called the film a "masterpiece" — though four years after Powell's death. In 2023, Film Foundation and BFI National Archive in partnership with StudioCanal restored the film in 4K (6K scan of the original negative, wet gate for scratches, frame-by-frame cleanup at Cineric) — for The Archers' 75th anniversary. The negative itself, contrary to the memoir legend about "black-market video pirates," calmly sat in StudioCanal's library the whole time.
And now — about Karlheinz Böhm, because this is a separate story, mirrored to the film. He was an idol of German-speaking audiences as Emperor Franz Joseph in Sissi, and the role of the maniac with a camera, in Der Spiegel's formulation, "destroyed his image and insulted his fans." Der Spiegel assessed later: "Left cinema — and became a blessing for the people of an entire country and a bitter loss for cinematography."
What happened next doesn't fit any screenplay. In 1981, at 53, on the show Wetten, dass..?, Böhm made a bet: that not even one in three viewers would donate a franc for the starving Sahel. He won the bet — but viewer shock was so great they collected 1.2 million francs, with which Böhm immediately flew to Ethiopia. Thus began the foundation Menschen für Menschen: 2100 people resettled from the Babile camp to the fertile Erer valley, the village "Nagaya" — "peace," the concept "help for self-development" — materials and training so people could lift themselves out of poverty. By the time of Böhm's death in 2014, the foundation had built 173 schools, 3 hospitals, dozens of medical centers, water points, roads and bridges, programs against early marriage and female genital mutilation, microcredit for women. The 2007 Balzan Prize was awarded to him "for humanity, peace, and brotherhood among peoples." Asked about motivation, he answered with one five-letter word — anger, rage at inequality.
An almost botanical arc: the actor played a man who destroyed people with a camera, then spent thirty years on the opposite — so that people no one was watching would finally be seen and receive help. Mark filmed fear, Böhm filmed poverty — but with opposite sign: not into his own collection, but into someone's life. If Powell had lived to see this and written it — he wouldn't have believed it.
First. Peeping Tom is the rarest case where a film's failure was not an artistic mistake but a systemic event. The financial base (Rank, Korda) collapsed before the premiere; the distributor panicked over a knighthood; critics struck not at quality but at ideological incompatibility — the film didn't fit into the framework of English realism. All four links worked simultaneously, and that's rare: Steven Spielberg survived 1941, Francis Ford Coppola survived One from the Heart, Cimino — Heaven's Gate turned into someone's career, but Powell's fate is a separate, almost biological case of simultaneous collapse of all life-support systems.
Second. The film's real discovery is not the plot but the mechanics of the gaze. Cinema was always built on viewer anonymity: we look through the keyhole and nothing happens to us. Peeping Tom is the first major film to systematically expose this contract: we don't just observe the maniac, we're his accomplices, because he's also watching, and his camera watches for him, and ultimately we watch through his eyes. Sixty years before YouTube and TikTok, Powell formulated the ethics of the reality era: everyone who presses "play" is already in the game. And for me this is all the more elegant because Powell himself was a director, not a moralist — he doesn't condemn voyeurism, he simply says: you're here too.
Third. "The film was ahead of its time" is usually an empty phrase. Here it's literally precise: the film appeared 15 years before the theory capable of reading it. Powell made a metacommentary on the mechanics of gaze in 1960, when vocabulary for such conversation didn't yet exist — and the audience and critics physically lacked language. When language appeared (Mulvey, 1975), when a new generation of directors came (Scorsese, 1979), when DVD and internet made the canon accessible — the film found its place. And The Red Shoes is now forever in Scorsese's DNA, and the editor Powell met 24 years after the failure edits the greatest films of modernity. Success, it turns out, sometimes arrives 20 years late — and still makes it in time.