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Snuff Is Enough

1/17/2014

Don't let any hipster cineaste talk you into this one.

Peeping Tom (1960)

I'm not sure why I decided to look at this film again; didn't care for it the first time I saw it years ago, but thought maybe I was missing something. And since it is Moira Shearer's birthday today, I thought I'd give it another try.

Turns out I was right the first time and am not at all on board with the recentish, mystifying opinion (imdb, Roger Ebert, Martin Scorsese) that the film was unjustly trashed when it came out and is, in fact, another masterpiece about the nature of film by Michael Powell. It's just not.

I've decided to put most of the blame on Carl (Karlheinz) Boehm, the actor playing the homicidal weirdo. I get what the film is supposed to do -- challenge the audience to confront its own voyeurism by watching this thoroughly damaged cameraman murder women with a knife fixed to the end of the tripod holding the camera that is filming the murder. But what girl in post-war London wouldn't run far, far away from a blond guy with a camera and trench coat who talks like Peter Lorre (but really really slowly) and doesn't blink?

Mark Lewis, the killer Peeping Tom, is a shy, freaky young man who lives in and lets rooms in his childhood home, where his "scientist" father conducted psychosexual experiments on him and documented it all on film for posterity. Mark, all (well not all) grown up, films everything all the time — including the occasional hooker he's in the middle of murdering — and develops the footage in his rooms. Mark is befriended by one of his boarders, Helen (Anna Massey), a young children's book writer. Helen's blind and drunk mother (Maxine Audley), not being able to see, just knows there is something reaaaaallly wrong with Mark, because she hears him watching films night after night in his room (and the blind are magic). Mark has murdered (and filmed) a stand-in (Moira Shearer) at the movie studio he works in and Helen's mother confronts him while he's replaying the movie. Yet he doesn't kill her; there's no fun in filming someone who can't appreciate that you're murdering them at the time. She suggests he get some help.

Eventually, Helen also sees the movie (one of the best sequences, actually: Anna Massey reacting to what she's watching) and is surprised by Mark who admits what he is and what he's done. Blah blah, father tortured him, blah, police bang on door, blah, he kills himself with his own camera/weapon, blah blah.

Apart from a few really nicely framed scenes in Powell's trademark hyper-saturated color, this film isn't very good. Even otherwise fine actors come off cartoony or wooden. Most of the action is accompanied by the plink-plonk of some musician's idea of what "nuts" sounds like on a piano, which doesn't help at all.

Ah well. Happy birthday, anyway, lovely Moira Shearer. Maybe this would have been better as a musical, like Tales of Hoffman.

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Birthday of the Week: Moira Shearer

1/13/2014

1 Comment

Moira Shearer, Lady Kennedy January 17, 1926

Biography

Moira Shearer: Portrait of a Dancer
By Pigeon Crowle
Pittman Publishing Company, 1950

"The Red Shoes (1948) ruined my career in the ballet."

Moira Shearer was a contemporary of not-yet Dame Margot Fonteyn in the Sadler's Wells Ballet (now the Royal Ballet) from 1942 to 1952, While still a member of the company, she reluctantly accepted the starring role for which she is best remembered, Victoria Page, in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's classic, The Red Shoes.

Although most of us who've seen the film believe she made the right decision, Shearer regretted playing Vicky for the rest of her life, because it portrayed the life of a ballerina in such a negative light. Her appearance in the film also caused audiences and peers alike to take her less seriously as a dancer, the very concern she expressed when considering the role. But she was persuaded by the ballet company director that whatever fame she would get from the film would benefit the company, which turned out to be true. And we have the added benefit of getting to see Moira's Shearer's beautiful 22-year-old person and flaming red hair forever, whether she liked it or not.

Shearer left the ballet at the age of 27 and went on to make a handful of interesting films before retiring to raise the four children she had with Ludovic Kennedy, an investigative reporter and television journalist, whom she married in 1950, In the 1970s she was a member of various UK art councils (even hosting the 1972 wackathon that is The Eurovision Song Contest) and toured the United States giving lectures on the history of ballet.

In her spare time, she wrote Balletmaster: A Dancer's View of George Ballanchine (1986) and wrote a regular book review column for The Daily Telegraph.

I love ballet when I think of it, which means I'm not in any way a connoisseur, but what little I know of it and why it's important and why it makes me feel things, is because of Moira Shearer, Powell & Pressburger, and The Red Shoes. I saw the film when I was a little girl and it is probably the reason I didn't go kicking and screaming to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center to see the American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet when I was a tweeny brat. Thank god, because at the time, Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov were principals, and we didn't always just have lawn seats.

In addition to grace and beauty, Moira Shearer was a fine actress with subtle, sweet comic timing. I'm sorry she hated movies so much, because it would good to have a broader record of her talent.

Moira Shear died in January 2006, shortly after her 80th birthday with her husband of 56 years at her side.