Fifty years ago Peeping Tom was the "beastly" (Financial Times), "dreadful" (Sunday Dispatch), "corrupt and empty" (Evening Standard), "perverted nonsense" (Daily Worker) that put paid to Michael Powell's career as the greatest non-exiled director this country has ever produced.
The criticism meted out to the movie – which features a young scopophiliac cameraman who films his victims as he murders them – was staggering in its blunderbuss hostility. Peeping Tom's full-throated denunciation by every major film critic in the country – no fewer than three of whom asked, "why, oh why …?" – may have ended Powell's career 20 years prematurely, but in retrospect, what the film's dismal reception reveals to us now is all the limitations and shortcomings of the British school of broadsheet film criticism in the era before video granted all citizens the chance of full cine-literacy.
It was a dismal display of myopia, short-sightedness and prejudice. I've often wondered if the critics' strange and awful unanimity didn't arise from the very public walk-out, during the film's trade screening at the end of March 1960, of Observer critic CA Lejeune, who grabbed her handbag, said loudly, "I'm sickened!" and flounced out. She never thought to mention this walk-out in her own review (during which she wrote, "I don't propose to name the players in this beastly film"), though other critics cited it approvingly) in their own reviews.
Given the prominence of Lejeune, who, it is reported, got into movie-reviewing because her mother was a pal of Guardian editor CP Scott (she jumped ship to the Observer in 1928, but frankly preferred opera to movies, and whose collected work today lies deader than dead on the page), one wonders if there wasn't a spurious (possibly chivalrous) instance of critical group-think among her less "distinguished" peers. It is as if that one walk-out sanctioned the total, lock-step denunciation without even the merest scintilla of serious engagement with the work at hand.
Or did they simply all hate Powell by this time? Powell's career had been on a downward slide for much of the 1950s. He was weakened and partnerless on Peeping Tom, a sitting duck for backed-up critical resentment. Given the enthusiasm of British critics back then for boringly unambiguous moral seriousness and quasi-documentary realism, their reaction to the florid, joyous, almost un-British exuberance of Powell and Pressburger's greatest films and to the sheer technical and philosophical audacity of Peeping Tom (against the burgeoning it's-tough-oop-north aesthetic being pioneered by Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson) demonstrated a blindness to talent and invention that suggests it was they, and not Powell, who were past their sell-by date.