Trailer
Plot summary
Mark Lewis works on a London film crew as a focus puller and hopes to make films of his own. He earns extra money taking pin-up photographs of women that are sold under the counter. Shy and reclusive, he keeps to himself outside his work. The house he occupies belonged to his father, and most of it is let through an agent while Mark presents himself as a tenant. In the flat below, Helen Stephens lives with her blind mother; she befriends Mark after she finds him watching her twenty-first birthday party. Mark describes the film he is making as a study of fear, and with his camera he records the terror of the women he kills.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Peeping Tom (1960)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Peeping Tom's violence and sexual content made it controversial on release, and the critical backlash was a major factor in ending Michael Powell's career as a director in the United Kingdom. Karlheinz Böhm recalled that after the premiere, nobody in the audience shook his hand or Powell's.
- Nat Cohen wanted a star for the lead and suggested Dirk Bogarde, but the Rank Organisation, which had him under contract, refused to loan him out; Laurence Harvey was attached but pulled out during pre-production. Michael Powell ended up casting German-Austrian actor Karlheinz Böhm, billed as Carl Boehm.
- Martin Scorsese, who first saw Peeping Tom in 1970 through a friend's uncut 35 mm color print, was asked in 1978 by New York distributor Corinth Films for $5,000 for a wider re-release, and gladly paid it, reaching an audience far beyond the original cult following.
- London glamor model Pamela Green was cast as Milly, one of the killer's victims, who appears nude before her murder; her appearance marked the first scene in British cinema to feature frontal nudity.
- When Peeping Tom opened in Italy in 1960, the review committee rated it unsuitable for under-16s and required cuts before public screening: two scenes in the photographer's studio, including Milly half-undressed before a mirror, plus two scenes of a woman half-undressed on a bed. Finland banned the film until 1981.
- Leo Marks's original screenplay drew on his childhood as the son of Benjamin Marks, owner of the Marks & Co bookshop in London, and on the shop's inner-city regulars. Dora, the prostitute murdered in the opening scene, was based on a real prostitute who frequented the store.
- According to Variety, Anglo-Amalgamated invested $560,000 in Peeping Tom, the most that company, which typically funded "B" crime pictures and the Carry On films, had ever spent on any single film.
- A campaign video for the 2014 spring/summer Alexander McQueen collection was based on Peeping Tom's opening scene, with Kate Moss playing the role of the killer's victim.
