Hitch, in a startling close-up relatively early in the film when Perkins' Bates spies on Leigh's Crane in her hotel room, shoots the eye from the side, maintaining an eerie objectivity). (It's also fascinating to contrast the way the two directors depict the eye in their film: Powell shoots the orb either straight on, or, more frequently, implies that it exists by making the camera provide point of view shots. And since he had let the film breathe for so long before that sequence, the audience was ensconced for the ride, this time quite willingly.
Hitchcock, ever the reserved objectivist, stood back, looked at a situation developing, and then calmly and clearly depicted his mayhem with a coldly clinical, surgical (no pun intended) detachment which made the imagery all the more gut wrenching. Powell started his Peeping Tom with a murder, in fact a "first person" killing that made the audience a participant in the mayhem, willing or not, and it may have been a fatal mistake from a marketing if not an artistic standpoint. Never before (and far too infrequently since) had a thriller taken its time the way Psycho did, with a long a prelude, including an unusually large amount of static shots, which lulled the audience into a state of (false) security, making that epochal shower scene all the more visceral. Can you imagine a contemporary filmmaker taking their time like that with a modern slash and dash outing? It's Psycho's almost somnambulant pace which, while first confounding critics (if not audiences, who were rapturously involved from day one), is Psycho's trump card. Twenty eight minutes! And then, we don't get the first, iconic murder until a good 20 minutes after that. Think about this for a moment in terms of modern day horror films: the "villain" of the piece, as oddly lovable as he is, doesn't show up until 28 minutes into the film. The fact that Powell makes the audience the killer, as it were, forced to look through Lewis' lens as he offs one comely lass after another may have shattered the safe and cozy fourth wall too completely for Powell's self-reflexive ideas to ever get past the shock.īut there's another, perhaps more subtle, reason that Psycho was such a sensation (in a good way) in its day, and has continued to be one of the most iconic horror films ever made. The two films are often mentioned in the same breath, as they both have an air of sexual depravity that was still rather rare in that quaintly prim and proper era which was still officially presided over by Eisenhower on this side of the pond, and Harold Macmillan "over there." So why the disparate responses? What was it about Peeping Tom that offended so many people so deeply, while they were simultaneously thrilled beyond measure by Psycho? After all, both films involve a madman who murders women if Peeping Tom simply had more notches on its murderous belt, can that be the only reason? Especially when Psycho's anti-hero also manages to kill at least one man? There's no getting around the fact that Peeping Tom's focus, Mark Lewis, also ups the ante by filming his murders, and that, along with the tangential issues of child abuse in the Powell film, probably helped to make it the cause célèbre it became (and not in a good way). Michael Powell saw his virtually end with the release of Peeping Tom. Alfred Hitchcock saw his career receive a huge shot in the arm courtesy of Psycho. Two iconic directors took enormous risks in 1960, entering into the tortured psyches of two very disturbed individuals. Either skip to the Video, Audio and Supplement sections, or better yet, just click the 'Pre-order/Buy Now' button up above, watch it, and then come back. If you've never seen the movie, don't read this review just yet. Note: It's next to impossible to discuss 'Psycho' without revealing the twists of the film. Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, October 6, 2010
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