Peeping Tom: The Film That Ended Michael Powell

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Two films arrived in 1960 about a shy, damaged man who kills women and can barely meet your eye. One made its director the most famous horror showman alive. The other finished its director’s career inside a fortnight. Alfred Hitchcock got Psycho. Michael Powell got Peeping Tom, and the British press treated it as something to be disposed of rather than reviewed.

The line everyone quotes belongs to Derek Hill in the Tribune: the only fit way to dispose of the film, he wrote, would be to shovel it up and flush it down the nearest sewer. He was not an outlier. The reviews read less like criticism than like an exorcism. And the man they were casting out had, ten years earlier, been half of the most gifted partnership in British cinema.

Michael Powell - vo.rs

Peeping Tom: The Film That Ended Michael Powell