It’s the sinister little secret of The Pink Smoke that we don’t much care for Alfred “Suspicion” Hitchcock. And while we certainly have zilch-o interest in debating the merits of a filmmaker that everyone can agree is “the greatest of all-time and you’d have to be some sort of malcontented and willful iconoclast to disagree,” we are interested in a strange phenomenon: while we don’t adore the man himself, we have a tendency to love Hitchcock knock-offs.

From William Castle’s lazy copy-catting to Francois Truffaut’s loving pastiches, there’s a chance that if a film shamelessly apes the master of suspense, we’re really going to enjoy it. Brian DePalma, Jonathan Demme, Stanely Donen; the list of great filmmakers who tried their hand at a Hitchcockian shtick is extensive and hugely appealing to explore – and honestly, we’ll take either “French Hitchcock” over the real thing any day, whether you consider the mantle to rightfully belong to H.G. Clouzot or Claude Chabrol.

In this series, we’ll look at parodies, assiduous imitators, and off-brand “Hitchcock-like Film Product” in order to dig into just what it is that we love so much about these movies. Sure, you’ll blanche at the suggestion,* but we think these films are Better Than Hitchcock.

previous entries in the series:
{THE BRIDE WORE BLACK}
{HIGH ANXIETY}
{MASQUES}
{LES DIABOLIQUES}

“I like to understand what I'm shown!”

The two things you will without fail be told about Peeping Tom are 1) it killed the career of theretofore esteemed British director Michael Powell, one half of the the filmmaking duo of Powell & Pressburger - also known as "The Archers" 2) it was released in 1960 shortly before Psycho. The first bit is interesting; there are few instances where a director as respected as Powell was able to wreck their careers with a single film. It’s stunning to think that the creator of masterpieces like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes and The Thief of Bagdad was able to blow it all up so thoroughly so quickly.* The second point has always left me a “who cares?” in the back of my head. Sure, the films have superficialities in common: top British directors making notorious thrillers about serial killers twisted by bad relationships with their parents. But exploring the connections just confirms their superficiality.

The obvious question to ask after Psycho comes up is, “What does Peeping Tom stylistically have in common with a film shot on location in unadorned black & white by a crew normally used for shooting television episodes?” That’s why the next level cliche about Powell’s film (with its stage-bound sets, delicate Technicolor color-scheming and focus on scoptophilia) is that it actually has more in common with its immediate Hitchcockian predecessors Vertigo and Rear Window. But even here, the urge to tie Peeping Tom to Hitchcock is questionable - it reminds me of how Shakespeare manages to come up in discussions of playwrights he couldn’t have less to do with or how the Bob Dylan gets his name into reviews of Bob Seeger albums.

Somewhat mysteriously, Hitchcock and Truffaut, both separately and together, more or less refused to acknowledge Michael Powell’s existence. The definitive interview compendium Hitchcock/Truffaut doesn’t mention Peeping Tom, doesn’t mention Michael Powell’s name in any context. The film and director also don’t come up in Truffaut’s The Films in My Life - they’re not listed in the index and I can’t recall them being referenced obliquely or as a generality either in the context of Hitchcock (e.g. “Other English thrillers at the time…” “Hitchcock’s British contemporaries…” etc.)

Truffaut’s most famous quote that could be applied to Powell is this, “To put it bluntly… there [is] a certain incompatibility between the terms ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain.’” (I first came across its ironic usage in the epigraph of Roy Armes’ A Critical History of British Cinema.) This is a funny belief for Hitchcock’s #1 super-fan to hold, but the independence and idiosyncrasy of Hitchcock was always something valued by the Cahiers du Cinema critics (like Truffaut who) adored him. Michael Powell is, on the other hand, presumably supposed to be lumped in with the lot of filmmakers incompatible with the medium itself.

That Truffaut quote is one that gets dredged up constantly by critics such as myself interested in somehow resolving the famed Hitchcock-Powell-Nouvelle-Vague confluence of the late 50’s: the explosion of the French New Wave right at the moment of Powell’s implosion (with Chabrol, Truffaut & Godard all making their debuts virtually simultaneously to Psycho and Peeping Tom) combined with Hitchcock’s ascension to the pantheon of cinematic Gods at the pen-stroke of those same critics turned filmmakers. It all makes for a tempting inquiry for any archeologist of le cinema.

Unfortunately, I think Truffaut’s silence on Powell can be most easily explained by the traditional French antipathy for the British, particularly in the realm of art. If Hitchcock hadn’t hightailed it for Hollywood he likely would’ve stayed on their shitlist as well (especially if he continued making films like Easy Virtue, The Skin Game and Waltzes from Vienna.) The impulse to reconcile Powell with Hitchcock and the New Wave comes from the fact that critics and historians find it impossible to tell the story of cinema history without mentioning Hitchcock, Godard or Truffaut - they’re brought up even when we could all do without them being brought up yet again (again, just like I have to hear about the goddamned Beach Boys every time an important record comes out.) I have yet to come across a satisfactory reason for tying these disparate elements together apart from historical proximity and mild thematic links - Hitchcock and Powell, as artists, have almost nothing to do with each other.

Fascinatingly, Michael Powell has nothing but praise for Hitchcock, whom he worked for early in his career… but he also takes credit for giving Hitchcock the idea for the climax Blackmail (a pursuit in the domed Reading Room of the British Museum), a sequence that many critics and historians see as a the turning point in Hitchcock’s style. In his autobiography, A Life in Movies, he writes “…so I think I can make a modest claim to being the inventor of the Hitchcock Climax, unveiled to the world through the chase in Blackmail, and which led us all on many a delightful dance from Tower Bridge to Mount Rushmore, from the Statue of Liberty to you name it.”

Our more critically minded reader might notice that this not a modest claim at all.**

The autobiography actually spells out the incident in detail, most of the story coming down to Powell’s idea that the character in the film (being a local) should take the climactic chase to places unfamiliar to audiences not from the area where the movie is set (outer London.) Whether or not Powell actually gave Hitchcock this idea (neither Hitchcock nor his screenwriting partner/wife Alma confirmed the anecdote), it’s fascinating to see Powell correctly identify the inception of Hitchcock’s signature, articulate the philosophy behind it and then take credit for it in one fell swoop. If he “loved” Hitchcock as he claimed to, he had an interesting relationship to that love.

But then again, anyone who’s seen Peeping Tom knows that Powell has some very strange ideas about the meaning of love. Peeping Tom is an analysis of feeling on Powell’s part: it’s fixated on untangling the meaning of the idea of love. It’s a film that loses itself over and over in the morass of unresolvable ironies about love as a destructive force, love as the worst connection to have to another human, love as a pitiable state that leaves one open to manipulation, dependency and misery. Love as a repellent need. And there it is, that’s the primary difference between Psycho and Peeping Tom: the sincerity of their interests. Peeping Tom’s complete failure took down Powell because the film gets too sincerely caught up in its subject - it wans't simply a commercial and critical failure. The film appeared to many as proof of the human failure of Powell himself.

In a 1986 interview with Trevor Johnson, Powell had this to say about Peeping Tom’s inception: “Leo Marks initially tried to sell me a double-agent story because he’d been in the coding rooms during the war, but I just didn’t want to make that sort of film at that time. I felt I’d sized him up so I asked him about the possibility of doing something on Freud. He came back a week later with this idea for a story about a young man who kills with his camera. ‘You’re on,’ I said. ‘That’s me. Let's make it.’”

I’m not going to argue that Psycho is a fundamentally insincere artwork, but when asked by Truffaut about what drew him to Psycho, all Hitchcock had to say was this: “I think the thing that appealed to me and made me decide to do the picture was the suddenness of the murder in the shower, coming, as it were, out of the blue. That was about all.” Maybe my point is too subtle, but it seems to me a pretty obvious contrast between the driving interests of the filmmakers: Freud vs. a surprise shower murder. It’s fairly hard to imagine a scenario in which Hitchcock turns down a double-agent story, either.

The difference in the meanings of the films is apparent in their writers, the minds from which their stories originated. Psycho novelist Robert Bloch was a journeyman, I’d say the definition of a “hack” if the word didn’t carry too deep of negative connotations. He wrote every kind of genre story - horror, science fiction, fantasy - for lurid magazines that paid by the word. To say that he was a journeyman and a hack only means that he wrote specifically the words he got paid by; there’s not much of an authorial signature across the spectrum of his work and he didn’t evince any particular set of interests to which he returned over and over. After Psycho was a hit, he became “the Psycho guy” and casual fans would be hard-pressed to name any thing else he ever did.

While Robert Bloch was a anonymous genre toiler, Peeping Tom screenwriter Leopold “Leo” Marks cut a genuinely off-beat figure. As a young man during WWII, he oversaw an encryptographic division for British and Allied spies and developed a method of encrypted poems that allowed them to be briefer and more easily remembered, allowed some beauty in their lives to meditate upon. After the war, he turned his focus to the arts where he worked as a playwright and screenwriter.

Unlike Bloch, his work displays a narrow set of interests. All of his films & plays focus on mental illness or the inner-workings of the mind: The Girl Who Couldn’t sounds like contrived pulp, but is a surprisingly sensitive exploration of amnesia and memory, Cloudburst plays like a typical film noir but is unusually perceptive about the intersection of obsession & grief. Even Twisted Nerve, likely his most famous work outside of Peeping Tom, has an obvious interest in mental illness and behavioral development even if that interest gets devolved into cheese-ball nonsense by a crummy filmmaker. Something like what I’m about to write is always speculative and impossible to prove, but Marks feels like a writer who wrote according to his interests while Bloch feels like a writer who wrote according to what he thought he could sell.

But there’s a funny thing with adapting Bloch’s novel into a script for Hitchcock, where it seems like in the execution it should reveal more about the filmmaker than it actually does. Psycho is interesting for being one (the first?) of Hitchcock’s films directly about woman-hating. I have no idea if it’s currently out of fashion to suggest Hitchcock is a misogynist. Initially, it was an incendiary accusation leveled by detractors as a way of dismissing his overt aesthetic prowess. For example, Ingmar Bergman: “I think he’s a very good technician… Psycho is one of his most interesting pictures because he had to make the picture very fast, with very primitive means. He had little money, and this picture tells very much about him. Not very good things. He is completely infantile, and I would like to know more — no, I don’t want to know — about his behavior with, or, rather, against women. But this picture is very interesting.”

At some point his antipathy for women became taken as a given, especially by Freudian critics of his work like Laura Mulvey with their focus on “castrating nooses,” Oedipal complexes and the “male gaze.” Here in 2017, it seems like most criticisms on the subject have found respite in the first refuge of scoundrels: "his work is not misogynistic, it is about misogyny." Many critics (perhaps more) regard Hitchcock’s vileness where women are concerned as besides the point - if any artwork persists long enough in the cultural memory, its repellent aspects will simply become points of anthropological interest, anyway.

The history of woman-hating in his work is fascinating - there’s little denying its almost total absence in his early pre-auteur work and little denying that by the end of his career it was one of his films’ most prominent elements. It’s hard to read the arc of development as anything other than, “The more Hitchcock was granted the autonomy to be himself, the more apparent his disdain for womankind became.” It’s a line of artistic evolution that develops in harmony with his repulsed contempt for homosexuality and “sissies” - another element of his style prominently on display in Psycho. Yes, that emnity for "feminine men" is different than the textured and deeply felt misogyny of his work: Norman Bates of course resembles no human being; he’s a cartoon boogeyman, a character that would be as ridiculous and grotesque as the murderous cross-dressing "half-caste" of Murder! if not for Anthony Perkin’s thoughtful performance redeeming it.

There’s been mountains of analysis on the subject of Hitchcock and the ladies, Hitchcock and feminine men, Hitchcock and normative heterosexuality, rehashing it in depth here feels unnecessary. To me, “Hitchcock on women” is an easy read: he feared women, he believed them to be self-centered and capricious and therefore capable of unendurable cruelty (specifically to the men who made the mistake of caring about them), but he was irresistibly drawn to them so his artistic depiction shifted between idealization and disgust, adoration and hatred. The only time his work came close to expressing an organized understanding of that dynamic was when Boileau-Narcejac’s concept for Vertigo sorted it out for him.

Hitchcock’s take on homosexuals is an even easier read: they act like women, but he wasn’t drawn to them so they made for perfect murderers, psychopaths, lurid conspirators and villains. Plus, the audience would naturally find them gross and detestable so they were villains that could be sketched in the same kind of convenient shorthand that he sketched Nazis, terrorists, and serial killers. There ain’t a hell of a lot more to it than that.

In terms of women protagonists, he’d take pity on the naive girl-on-the-verge-of-womanhood leads of Shadow of a Doubt, Jamaica Inn or Rebecca but their pitiableness was dependent on their girlish lack of control - their incomplete womanhood. His sympathetic eroticizing of young women is the flip-side of his use of feminized men as villains. He’s drawn to these beautiful young woman, happy to eroticize their innocence because it poses none of the danger that “complete” women pose. There's a quality he seems to find delictable in introducing these characters to their films' duplicitous, controlling, woman-hating villains, too: Jospeh Cotten's Uncle Charlie, Charles Laughton's Sir Pengallan, even Cary Grant's false-villain in Suspicion. With their perverse senses of humor, proclivity for manipulation & simmering rage for womankind, it's tough not to read these villains as the clearest Hitchcock surrogates in his filmography.

The writing team Boileau-Narcejac (of Les Diaboliques) identified these urges in Hitchcock’s storytelling and explicated them: their script for Vertigo says to him, “You idealize because you are afraid. And you can resist neither your desire nor your fear.” Coming on the heels of Vertigo, Psycho feels like a regression to his old tricks but one intent on dropping the obliqueness and subliminal characterizations of his earlier work. After Boileau-Narcejac had given form to his subliminal impulses with Vertigo, he couldn’t put the devils back in the box. Vertigo’s concept is profoundly simple: an obsessive alternation between idealization and fear as a result of an illusory mother/whore dynamic. But Hitchcock seems to have learned nothing from Vertigo apart from the notion that he could make those subliminal themes more explicit and critics would applaud him for it.

Psycho lacks the analysis, the philosophical-emotional bite of Vertigo, a film that remains the great outlier in his career. With Psycho, it all goes back to the dull quote about what drew his attention to the project in the first place: a tinkerer’s interest in perfecting the mechanics of a single set-piece; a central sequence if not entire film spun out of a basic aesthetic concept. It might not be as notorious as “the Hitchcock Climax” Powell claims to have invented, but the "set-piece that exists only to serve an aesthetic moment" runs throughout Hitch’s career: the sound of the dead man on the organ in Secret Agent, the dress like blood in Topaz, the eyes twitching in Young and Innocent, the biplane attack in North by Northwest, the uninterrupted take of Rope, the dream sequence of Spellbound. Who knows if anything about Vertigo even appealed to him but the push-zoom on the bell-tower stairs?

With Peeping Tom, Michael Powell’s interests were the complete opposite: thematic, emotional and philosophical. He came to the film with ideas about the why of the script that weren't “the thing that appealed to me was the idea of the killer forcing the victims to see themselves as they die.” There’s an unsettlingly personal nature to the film that’s likely reason audiences and critics were so put off by it (while being thrilled to embrace the “for entertainment purposes only” posture of Psycho.) Peeping Tom is on some level how Michael Powell feels about filmmaking! The film dares you to think about its creator, all but insists you project Michael Powell into its depraved main character.

There’s no Hitchcock analog in Psycho, no character in the film with whom you can imagine Hitchcock strongly identifying - part of his designation as a puppet maestro jerking the strings is how he fundamentally positions himself as an artist above the work, looking down on it, chuckling at the puppets below and delighting in the audience’s helpless reaction to his manipulation of it all. The peeping tom in Psycho is a mama-obsessed sissy-boy (boooooo!!!!! we hate him!) while the seeming lead of the film is quickly re-rendered into the filmmaker’s preferred state for a woman: a beautiful body without a person inside it. Cameo aside, Hitchcock himself is nowhere to be found in Psycho - his famous appearance as an omniscient force in the trailer for the film is no coincidence.

But Michael Powell is his film’s pathetic anti-hero Mark Lewis. I mean, the guy's big moment is directing a Moira Shearer dance routine. You can feel Powell in the character - not just in giving him a job as a film studio cameraman, but making him a filmmaking obsessive, a man obsessed not just with the photographic image as an aesthetic object but with his audience’s emotional reaction to the photographic image. The story follows a serial killer who films women as he murders them and then watches the footage obsessively in a screening room he has built in his attic. His obsession is with achieving the deepest look of terror on their faces - he realizes that to do so, he must point a mirror at them as they are being filmed.

“You know what the scariest thing in the world is? Fear.” he says to the naive young woman who has made the mistake of falling in love with him (very much a Hitchcockian naif like the heroine of Rebecca or Shadow of a Doubt - only the film is not from her perspective (a major difference.)) The creation of audiences, the creation of creators, the creation of emotion, these are the film's obsessive conerns. The film itself, Michael Powell’s passionate artistic expression itself, is entirely entangled in the convoluted relationship between creator, audience, obsession, reaction and the reliving of trauma. A young guy wants to kill people with his camera? “You’re on. That’s me.”

There’s a moment early in the film when Lewis listlessly films a buxom blonde during a low-rent pin-up photo-shoot. She’s accompanied by a young model; we’re told it’s her first shoot. The young model clearly wants to be anywhere else. When she finally turns to face Lewis, we can see a scar deforms her beauty, a jagged mess cutting from the base of her nose through her lip. Lewis is suddenly seized by an overwhelming urge to film her, he suddenly displays an obsessive passion absent from his filming of the more typical beauty of the buxom blonde. It’s hard not to feel the passion seizing Powell thoroughout Peeping Tom, his fascination with grotesquery and misery as palpable and violent as Lewis’ (and to be sure, the model’s emotional state is what captures Lewis’ imagination as much as the scar.)

The film doubles back on itself: our morally gnarled hero was himself the victim of cruelty that expressed itself in filmmaking: his father, a behavioral scientist, filmed Lewis as a little boy while subjecting the child to experiments exploring the nature of fear. Peeping Tom features “film within a film” flashback footage of the psychologist subjecting his son to these cruel experiments. It should come as no surprise that Powell’s own son plays the little boy awakened by having lizards tossed on him and terrorized by an unseen cameraman. It’s probably even less surprising that the one time the cruel psychologist wanders into the mise-en-scene, out of focus, he’s played by Powell himself.

Psycho is every bit as repulsive a film as Peeping Tom, in some ways more so, but unlike Psycho the intensity of Peeping Tom’s unpleasantness means something, it has a power to Powell himself that can be felt by his audience. It’s a film that you watch as Anna Massey’s naif watches the child-torture footage shown to her by Lewis: gripping your chair, repeating over and over “What did you show me? I like to understand what I'm shown!”

Peeping Tom seems inspired by Fritz Lang’s M, one of the few serious films about compulsion and murder to pre-date Powell’s movie (Val Lewton's The Leopard Man from 1943 is another notable precursor.) Carl Boehm as Mark Lewis delivers his lines with a soft, lilting German accent that recalls Peter Lorre’s work in Lang’s film. The thematic links are clear enough: two stories about anti-social, seemingly gentle murderers who just can’t help themselves. There’s also something intriguing (but impossible to make concrete) about Peeping Tom’s ahead-of-curve accuracy on the subject of serial murder and M’s connections to the Peter Kürten case (the Vampire of Düsseldorf in 1920’s Germany), where the investigating detective (Ernst Gennat) put forth the first known usage of the phrase “serial murder” (serienmörder.) Both films display a sensitivity and intelligence of analysis in their conception of the subject that’s rare in most artworks taking up the issue despite the omnipresence of the serial killer archetype. Both films have a detective’s mind and an artist’s heart. Their connections are deep, but furthermore they illustrate the superficiality linking Peeping Tom to Psycho.

Psycho, of course, has no interest in reality, or at least an insincere one. It’s supposedly based on “The Ghoul of Plainfield,” a nercophiliac named Ed Gein but Hitchcock only has the vaguest sense of the real case - in Hitchcock/Truffaut he described the Gein as “a man who kept his mother’s body in his house, somewhere in Wisconsin.” Which is probably the understatement of the book: Gein murdered lonely women, dug up corpses, fashioned clothes like belts and shirts out of flayed and tanned skin (he loved making knick-knacks out of vulvas) and when he was a caught, a body was found hung up in his shed field-dressed like a deer. One thing he didn’t do was keep his mother’s body in his house, despite his reputation as a momma’s boy and the complete collapse of his sanity after she died. There’s little doubt Hitchcock is indifferent to the realities of Gein's case.

With Robert Bloch, it’s harder to say whether he cares about the reality of Gein - you might think he knows more about the case and at a glance his novel does seem to have been inspired by Gein’s idea of creating a “woman-suit” to replace his deceased mother. But then he says stuff like this in interviews, “Thus the real-life murderer was not the role model for my character Norman Bates. Ed Gein didn't own or operate a motel. Ed Gein didn't kill anyone in the shower. Ed Gein wasn't into taxidermy. Ed Gein didn't stuff his mother, keep her body in the house, dress in a drag outfit, or adopt an alternative personality.” The best way to describe those statements is “not assiduously researched.” At other times, Bloch alleged Norman Bates was based on a “momma’s boy” publisher of pulp magazines named Calvin Beck, which feels more than score-settling or a cheap insult than a truthful exploration of the darkness of the human mind.

That’s the weird thing about Psycho: even after watching the film a half dozen times, I have no idea how Hitchcock feels about the story of a man driven insane by the oppression of a woman who only exists in his mind. You can read it like Hitchcock parodying himself, but there’s no sense of that in the material. The final deluge of clichéd expository psychologizing to which the character is subjected gets parsed by critics for meaning all the goddamned time, but it truthfully serves only to set up a dumb jump scare to end the film. It has precisely as much depth and substance as Jason popping out of the water at the end of Friday the 13th.

The fact that Hitchcock doesn’t really care about the meaning of his story is evidenced by the fact that he continued to thoughtlessly wander down the path of increasingly explicit misogyny without any attendant increase in analysis of it. That thoughtlessness is how he ended up following Psycho by alternating empty spy pictures like Topaz and Torn Curtain with the truly jaw-dropping exercises in woman-reviling unpleasantness Marnie and Frenzy.

Boileau-Narcejac’s script for Vertigo opened for him a door to a greater psychological understanding of his work but then he had no idea what to do once he stepped through it. There’s a heat to the antipathy for women in Marnie, Frenzy and Psycho that’s rarely deliberately stoked in his pre-Vertigo work,*** but there’s not an attendant analysis or intelligence controlling the fire. It’s why you see the later films described over and over again as “indulging” his misogyny. The sheer intensity of the heat makes them tempting for reappraisal, the way any artwork with an obvious and passionate element is tempting to defend. Because who could make a film so loaded with violent contempt for women as Marnie and not have some notion of what they were doing?

Peeping Tom has a similar and equal, maybe even more intense heat, to Psycho but Powell’s chosen the murderous tension between the sexes as his theme. The idea that lurking inside every man is a weirdo pervert is one the movie’s core concerns. Early on, there’s a scene in a news-stand where a fussily proper businessman comes in to buy under-the-table pornography from the avuncular shop-owner. As their transaction is going down, an adolescent girl comes in to buy a candy-bar. She interrupts the perverse exchange entirely oblivious to what these seemingly respectable men are up to. The constant in the film is how the women, even the savvy ones, are entirely caught off guard by just how much the creeps around them want to strangle them to death and then jerk off to photos of the corpse.

Our creepy-peeper hero Mark Lewis takes the nude-y pics for the new-stand proprietor: the shop-owner has made Lewis memorize a mantra about which magazines sell best: “The ones with the girls on the front covers and no front covers on the girls.” It’s hard not to get the sense that’s what Hitchcock is selling - one of the grodiest exchanges in Hitchcock/Truffaut details his wistful disappointment that Janet Leigh wouldn’t agree to be topless in peeping scene in Psycho: “the scene would’ve been more interesting if the girl’s bare breasts had been rubbing against the man’s chest.” By contrast, it's hard to imagine an interview with Powell where he would refer to Moira Shearer anonymously as a “girl” and lament her lack of nudity in Peeping Tom.

Peeping Tom is about what Psycho the film itself is.

Psycho is an expression of a mind opertaing within framework for organizing reality that has been distorted by perversity while also being a guileless sap to the audience’s desire see “no front cover on the girls.” That is, Psycho is an expression of Hitchcock feeling "I am enthusiastic about filming a naked lady getting stabbed in the shower" and he intends to create a money-making artwork for audiences that will be titlated by the same thing. Audiences are of course not monolithic and the slasher genre which Psycho presages has a complicated relationship to its audience, so I don't want to suggest that Psycho serves the same function as under-the-table pornography. So yes, issues of identification and gratification with the horror genre are not quite as clear-cut as Carol Clover makes out in Men, Women & Chainsaws (the basic guidebook for defending the genre) but in any case horror films aren't wholly playing to the same impulses as pornography. But they are playing to it some, in some parts of their non-monolithic, conflicted and conflicting audiences.

Peeping Tom is about how a sexually distorted framework is generated within men (and society) while narratively exploring the covert industry profiting from those perverse desires. With Peeping Tom, I understand what Powell is about completely - he’s got a critique fer sure. With Psycho, I’m hesitant to ascribe any motivations to Hitchcock beyond a combination of Lewis’ manic desire to possess beautiful women photographically (and enact cruelty on them in image) and the news-stand operator’s intent on making money off of that distorted and distorting “male gaze.”

The final tile in every “the facts of Peeping Tom” mosaic: the film was eventually championed by Martin Scorsese, which led to an overall rehabilitation of the reputation of Michael Powell and his longtime collaborator Emeric Pressburger (who had nothing to do with the film, but whose career suffered as collateral damage.)**** The implication with this bit of info is that Peeping Tom was ahead of its time and with the clarity of retrospect, its genius is obvious. The idea is that we should be able to see, now that the shock has worn off, how Peeping Tom falls completely in line with the rest of Powell’s career.

So let me throw out my final bit of dogged, prideful contrarianism: I don’t buy it. This is a weird fucking movie. The idea that audiences just weren’t ready for it in 1960 is all wrong: even if it had been made in 2017, audiences would’ve had just as repulsed and confused of a reaction. It’s impossible to imagine any kind of well-respected, middle-brow blockbuster-inclined director like Michael Powell making a film like Peeping Tom today and having it be warmly received. You just can’t make a movie like this, make a movie this weird, and expect people to go along with it. Aesthetically, morally and thematically, it’s just as off-kilter as its main character.

There’s a chilling moment when Lewis plays some audio recordings for his young would-be girlfriend (Anna Massey.) The recordings are of him being tortured as a boy, begging for the cruelty to stop and being told by his dispassionate father, “don’t be a silly boy, there’s nothing to be afraid of.” It’s heart-rending. It’s horrible. There’s no easy way to describe the mix of emotions and convergence of thematic ideas occurring in the moment. You just feel terrible watching it. By any standard, it’s not. a. good. time. at. the. movies.

Powell, like his hero Mark Lewis, is trying to communicate with his audience by showing them something awful. Ironically, audiences reacted with his attempt at connection far less sympathetically than Anna Massey’s character reacts to the footage Lewis shows her earlier in the film. I think Powell has some inkling of this, as his character learns, you can't just show people something powerfully strange and expect them to understand, can't just assault their emotions and expect them to connect. I think to this day most audiences would react unsympathetically to Peeping Tom if only because of its strange aesthetics. It’s a movie that employs an artful style to insist on sympathy for a true creep, a movie that travels deep into dark psychological territory while remaining stage-bound and artfully lit - it combines the ugliest psychologism realism with the most pleasantly artificial of studio-craftsmen filming techniques.

Throughout the film, the synapses just don’t quite touch. There’s a flurry of on-the-nose touches, like the blind woman being the only one who can see Lewis for what he is. Or Moira Shearer’s bit during a fake screen-test (a fake screen-test that has been set up purely so Lewis can film her being murdered) where she tells him how she just can’t work up the proper motivation for the fear he wants her to perform. Might he be able to help her? Waka-waka. The film has a puzzling mania for match-cutting: a close-up of tea being poured into a cup cuts to a close-up of whiskey being poured into a glass or there’s an edit from milk being poured to photo-developing chemicals being poured and so forth, continuously throughout the film. The score, easily the worst thing about the film, by composer Brian Easdale (who did magnificent work for Powell on The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus) plays like a lazy parody of horror film music. There’s a deeply strange conflict between the subtlety and obviousness of Peeping Tom.

It’s a movie that’s fundamentally schizophrenic and, even now when I watch it, I’m mystified that Powell thought it would be anything but a complete disaster. There’s a level on which it apes the structures and presentation of the cheapest “kill the pretty girls” cheapie - Halloween’s*** ** “killer’s POV goes up the stairs to a half-naked woman” opening is nearly identical to Peeping Tom’s, for example. But the notorious opening scene takes place on these forced perspective matte sets; griminess and perverse violence in a highly artificial and baroque environment. Between the overheated theatrical performances, the authentic psychological depravity, baroque lighting/sets and slasher film trappings (the killer has a novelty murder device, for God’s sake), it feel like you’re watching Magnificent Obsession wander into Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

Psycho, on the other hand, is in perfect harmony with itself. The black and white location photography is more low rent, raw and grimy than Hitchcock’s usual work but not too low rent, raw and grimy: the most famous locations are nevertheless sets, the image looks as professional as a television show not as minimally competent as a real “roughie,” there’s blood but not gore. If you place Hitchcock and Powell’s films beside each other, one looks like the work of a Master of Suspense and the other an expression of a completely unhinged mind.

But that contrast isn’t to one’s credit and the other’s detriment: Psycho’s style matches perfectly with the glib impression its script does of professional psychology - the whole of the film is an pantomime of realness that remains comfortably within the “boo!-and-gasp” of straightforward Hollywood entertainment. There are shocks and twists, but also pat resolutions within a traditional narrative framework. The story is about creeps and thieves but ones that neatly sort themselves into heroes and villains. There are glimpses of humanity’s true depravity but those glimpses are ameliorated by screenwriting ingenuity and engineered to serve the same entertaining purpose as a Dracula attack or a Black Lagoon’s creature stalking.

It’s impossible to imagine Hitchcock ending a film as Powell & Marks*** *** end Peeping Tom. Not the tortured anti-hero committing a complicated suicide where he kicks into motion a Rube-Goldberg-device-esque array of cameras to film his own fear, but the final lines of dialog, voice-over delivered to nearly black screen, the only image a movie screen half lit by an orange haze reminiscent of a light leak tainting a film magazine.

“Goodnight daddy, hold my hand.”

It’s a heart-breaking, unsettling, unexpected, gentle ending to a film that works itself into a frenzy throughout. It’s a weird ending to a weird movie. At the end of Psycho, Hitchcock wants to make you jump one final meaningless time at the ickiness of Norman Bates. At the end of Peeping Tom, Powell wants you to weep for Mark Lewis.