Peeping Tom (1960)

Stuart's Nite
CPK Pizza Assortment, Coconut Cake

Via The Powell & Pressburger Pages:
The Archers Manifesto

As outlined by Emeric Pressburger in a letter to Deborah Kerr to explain why she should join them for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

One, we owe allegiance to nobody except the financial interests which provide our money; and, to them, the sole responsibility of ensuring them a profit, not a loss.

Two, every single foot in our films is our own responsibility and nobody else's. We refuse to be guided or coerced by any influence but our own judgement.

Three, when we start work on a new idea we must be a year ahead, not only of our competitors, but also of the times. A real film, from idea to universal release, takes a year. Or more.

Four, no artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for other reasons than her nakedness.

Five, at any time, and particularly at the present, the self respect of all collaborators, from star to prop-man, is sustained, or diminished, by the theme and purpose of the film they are working on. They will fight or intrigue to work on a subject they feel is urgent or contemporary, and fight equally hard to avoid working on a trivial or pointless subject. And we agree with them and want the best workmen with us; and get them. These are the main things we believe in. They have brought us an unbroken record of success and a unique position. Without the one, of course, we should not enjoy the other very long. We are under no illusions. We know we are surrounded by hungry sharks. But you have no idea what fun it is surf-bathing, if you have only paddled, with a nurse holding on to the back of your rompers.

We hope you will come on in, the water's fine.

From the screenonline biography:
Michael Powell was born in Bekesbourne, near Canterbury, Kent, on September 30 1905. He left Dulwich College to work (briefly) in a bank before his father, a hotelier on the French Riviera, secured him an introduction to the Hollywood Irish director Rex Ingram, who was working at the Victorine studios in Nice. Powell worked for Ingram as a bit-player (The Magician (US, 1926)) and general assistant, then entered the nascent British film industry as story analyst and stills photographer....
Without Pressburger (but with Leo Marks), Powell made a late masterpiece, Peeping Tom (1960), at once a lurid horror film and a profound meditation on the unhealthiness of cinema. Powell's personal investment is obvious from his own appearance as murderer Karl Boehm's blameworthy father and casting that includes a star he had made (Shearer), the daughter of another old comrade (Anna Massey) and, in a crucial role, his own son Columba. Though it attracted a torrent of critical abuse, the film probably did less harm to its director's subsequent career than his conservatively patriotic The Queen's Guards (1961), which seemed to fly in the face of the radical zeitgeist of the 60s.

Powell reunited with Pressburger for an Australian odyssey - They're a Weird Mob (Australia/UK, 1966) - and for a children's fantasy - The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972). Neither film did anything to restore Powell's reputation, and his final film, Age of Consent (1969) - also made in Australia, with James Mason and a young, often nude Helen Mirren - was misunderstood and critically maligned.

In his last twenty years, Powell was recognised by disciples and critics as a major filmmaker, to the point where this once-despised figure now seems too comfortably swallowed by the accepted canon. But no-one greenlit the many projects he would like to have made, from The Tempest to The Fall of the House of Usher. Powell married Thelma Schoonmaker (the editor of his American champion Martin Scorsese's films) in 1984, and completed two fine volumes of autobiography. He died in Gloucestershire on February 19 1990.

Leo Marks, Cryptographer & Screenwriter:

Leo Marks, the son of a Jewish bookseller, was born in London on 24th September, 1920. Marks joined the British Army in January 1942. Trained as a cryptographer he was assigned to the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Marks became an expert in cryptanalysis (making and breaking codes and ciphers) and eventually became head of SOE's codes and ciphers with a staff of 400 people. It was Marks's responsibility to provide agents with the ciphers with which to send information to London by radio.

These ciphers were often based on famous poems or brief passages of memorable prose such as the Lord's Prayer. Marks argued that the enemy might know the poem or the prose passage and would then be able to break the cipher. To overcome this problem Marks provided unknown poems for his agents. This included the poem The Life That I Have, that had originally been written for his girlfriend, Ruth Hambro who had been killed in an air crash in Canada. He later gave the poem as a cipher to the SOE agent Violette Szabo when she was sent to France during the war.

When agents based in Holland began sending messages without any errors, Marks suspected they had been arrested by the Gestapo. To test his theory he sent indecipherable messages to the agents. When they did not complain he knew that the short-wave morse transceivers were under the control of the Germans. His warnings were ignored by Maurice Buckmaster and agents continued to be sent to Holland where they were arrested and in most cases executed.

On 23rd June, 1943, three key members of the Prosper Network, Andrée Borrel, Francis Suttill and Gilbert Norman, were arrested by the Gestapo. Noor Inayat Khan reported back to the Special Operations Executive that she had lost contact with the rest of the group and feared they were in the hands of the Germans. Jack Agazarian, who was on leave at the time, told the SOE that if this was the case, he suspected that they had been betrayed by Henri Déricourt, a former pilot in the French Air Force, whose job it was to find suitable landing grounds and organize receptions for agents brought by air.

Gilbert Norman continued to send messages to London. Marks, was convinced that Norman was under the control of the Gestapo. Major Nicholas Bodington disagreed and persuaded Maurice Buckmaster to let him go to France to find out what had happened. Jack Agazarian was recalled from leave and the two men were taken to France.

Messages from the wireless owned by Gilbert Norman were still being sent to the Special Operations Executive in London. Instructions were passed on to Bodington by the SOE to arrange a meeting with Norman at the address he had sent them. Bodington later claimed that he and Jack Agazarian tossed to decide who should visit the address. Agazarian, who was convinced it was a trap, lost, and when he arrived at the address he was immediately arrested. Agazarian was tortured by the Gestapo for six months at Fresnes Prison before being sent to Flossenburg where he was kept in solitary confinement.

After the war Marks became a writer for stage and screen. This included writing the script for Peeping Tom. Directed by Michael Powell in 1960 it tells the story of a serial killer who films young women as he stabs them to death. Condemned as pornographic and evil, it was not shown on television until 1997.

Marks also had trouble with his autobiography Between Silk and Cyanide, that challenged the official history of the Special Operations Executive written by M.R.D. Foot. Although written in the early 1980s it was blocked by Whitehall and only appeared in 1998. He also published The Life That I Have in 1999. Leo Marks died on 15th January 2001.

Writing Peeping Tom: The script for Peeping Tom was penned by Leo Marks who recalled in Michael Powell: Interviews, "I wanted at some stage or other to do a study in scoptophilia. The idea of a young cameraman who uses his camera as a method of murder and as a symbol of murder came at the same time as thinking about doing a subject about peeping toms. I'd been introduced to Michael Powell because we wanted to do another subject altogether which was the life of Freud. But we soon discovered that another producer [John Huston] had acquired the rights and Powell said have you anything else that might interest me? So I told him the whole theme of Peeping Tom, and he listened in silence - and he has a habit of looking into the middle distance when he's interested - I didn't know it at the time, I thought it meant that he was bored - but it always means he's concentrating, and he stared into the middle distance and then he said, 'That's mine, go and write it.'"

In his autobiography, Powell remembers of Marks, "Leo was an ideal creative partner. He knew nothing about films or the theater, but a very great deal about men and women. He was malicious, inventive and unshockable." They even named their central scoptophiliac character "Mark" in homage to Marks.

And the critics went wild:
"Neither the hopeless leper colonies of East Pakistan, the back streets of Bombay nor the gutters of Calcutta -- has left me with such a feeling of nausea and depression" vented Len Mosley of the Daily Express.

The Observer's Caroline Lejeune crowed, "It's a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom."

Derek Hill at the Tribune topped even those with "The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer."

BBC: Actress Anna Massey collects CBE

Massey won a Bafta for her role in Anita Brookner's Hotel Du Lac
Actress Anna Massey has been awarded a CBE for services to drama.

Massey received the honour from the Queen during an investiture at Buckingham Palace.

The 67-year-old actress - who is best known for her Bafta-winning role in Anita Brookner's Hotel Du Lac - has been a stalwart of UK productions.

Her film credits include 1960's Peeping Tom, Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy in 1972, comedy The Tall Guy in 1989 and The Importance of Being Earnest in 2002.

'Wonderful tradition'

Massey - the daughter of Canadian actor Raymond Massey, best known for his role as Dr Gillespie in the TV series Dr Kildare - was named in the New Year Honours list.

"I am absolutely thrilled to receive this," she said at the time.

"It was a lovely surprise to have my name put forward. We live in a country full of tradition and this is a wonderful tradition.

"In our profession, you get quite a lot of rejections so to receive something like this is lovely."

Laura Mulvey: Peeping Tom is a summation of Powell’s life in the cinema, perhaps particularly his polemics and his disappointments. The film also suggests that there is always more to cinema than meets the eye. Powell’s project was to make visible on the screen the invisible, the intuitive, and the hidden in human life through films that were “composed” out of all the aesthetic elements of the cinema. It is the spectator’s task to decipher the hieroglyph that the voyeur may see but cannot understand.