Peeping Tom

When the British press condemned Peeping Tom, Michael Powell’s career was effectively ruined. In his 1986 autobiography, Powell wrote: “I make a film that nobody wants to see and then, thirty years later, everybody has either seen it or wants to see it.” Long championed by filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, this fear-drenched tale of voyeurism and psycho-sexual desire now regularly appears on lists of the greatest British films ever made. Arriving in the same year as Norman Bates in Psycho, Powell’s portrait of sociopathic film technician Mark Lewis (a superb Karlheinz Böhm) is a riveting study in what it means to make movies – and watch them. Also check out Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, narrated by Martin Scorsese and screening in the Festival.