Peeping Tom movie review & film summary (1960)

There is more. We see little Mark filmed beside his mother's dead body. Six weeks later, another film, as his father remarries. (Wheels within wheels: The father is played by Michael Powell. Mark's childhood home is the London house where Powell was reared, and Mark as a child is played by Powell's son.) At the wedding, Mark's father gives him a camera as a present.

For Mark, the areas of sex, pain, fear and filmmaking are connected. He identifies with his camera so much that when Helen kisses him, he responds by kissing the lens of his camera. When a policeman handles Mark's camera, Mark's hands and eyes restlessly mirror the officer's moves, as if Mark's body yearns for the camera and is governed by it. When Helen tries to decide whether she should wear a piece of jewelry on the shoulder or at the neckline, Mark's hands touch his own body in the same places, as if he is a camera, recording her gestures.

Powell originally thought to cast Laurence Harvey in the lead, but he settled instead on Karl Boehm, an Austrian actor with such a slight accent in English that it sounds more like diffidence. Boehm was blond, handsome, soft and tentative; Powell was interested to learn that his new star was the son of the famous symphony conductor. He might know something of overbearing fathers.

Boehm's performance creates a vicious killer, who is shy and wounded. The movie despises him, yet sympathizes with him. He is a very lonely man.

He lives upstairs in a rooming house. The first room is conventional, with a table, a bed, a kitchen area. The second room is like a mad scientist's laboratory, with cameras and film equipment, a laboratory, a screening area, obscure equipment hanging from the ceiling.

Helen is startled when he reveals that the house is his childhood home, and he is the landlord: "You? But you walk around as if you can't afford the rent." Helen lives with her mother (Maxine Audley), who is alcoholic and blind, and listens to Mark's footsteps. When Helen tells her mother they're going out together, her mother says, "I don't trust a man who walks so softly." Later Mark surprises the mother inside his inner room, and she cuts right to the heart of his secret: "I visit this room every night. The blind always visit the rooms they live under. What am I seeing, Mark?"