Peeping Tom, colour-blind

For some reason I suddenly became curious as to what Michael Powell and Leo Marks’ PEEPING TOM would look like in black and white.

Maybe this is partly because Powell’s forties and fifties films in Technicolor are so gorgeous. And PEEPING TOM, though shot by the gifted Otto Heller (THE LADYKILLERS, THE IPCRESS FILE), is in the grungier Eastmancolor process, and not half as beautiful. Arguably it shouldn’t be beautiful, as it’s a more squalid and grim story than, say, THE RED SHOES. But I think the moody, red-lit stuff was intended to be both sleazy and glamorous, and the muckiness of the image (not helped, probably, by the deterioration of the unstable film stock) detracts from that.

 

Monochrome gives the images a noir quality, doesn’t it? The location stuff gains a verité feel.

The gaudiness of the porn theme is definitely lessened, which is a loss. But it makes me think that, if it had been released in b&w, the film might not have attracted half as much critical opprobrium as it got. So we’d have lost some of the film’s transgressive ick factor, but Powell might have been able to make more movies. (Except that probably the film that really wrecked his career was THE QUEEN’S GUARDS, a major studio production which is really pretty terrible.)

Of course, we have to accept the film as it is. I was just curious. Now I’m wondering what other movies I might decolorize, like a roving anti-Ted Turner, with slimmer wallet.