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| The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Even then, the stench would remain. |
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| (Derek Hill, Tribune) |
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| The sickest and filthiest film I remember seeing... children’s terror used as entertainment, atrocious crudity put on the screen for fun. And the main character, and madman murderer, is played all through as hero - handsome, tormented, lovable, a glamorous contrast to the heroine’s alternative youths... and in the end her romantic sprawl besids the beloved killer is implicitly sickening. |
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| (Isabel Quigly, Spectator) |
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| ln the last three and half months... I have carted my travel-stained carcase to some of the filthiest and most festering slums in Asia. But nothing, nothing, nothing - 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 as I got this week while sitting through a new British film called Peeping Tom. I am a glutton for punishment, and I never walk out of films or plays no matter how malodorous. But I must confess that I almost followed suit when I heard my distinguished colleague Miss Caroline Lejeune say: “I am sickened!” just before she made her indignant exit... Mr Michael Powell (who once made such outstanding films as Black Narcissus and A Matter of Life and Death ) produced and directed Peeping Tom and I think he ought to be ashamed of himself. The acting is good. The photography is fine. But what is the result as I saw it on the screen? Sadism, sex, and the exploitation of human degradation. |
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| (Len Mosley, Daily Express) |
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| It’s a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom... This so-called entertainment is directed by Michael Powell, who once made such distinguished films as A Matter of Life and Death and 49th Parallel ... I don’t propose to name the players in this beastly picture. |
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| (C.A. Lejeune, Observer) |
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| Ugh! Obviously, Michad Powell made Peeping Tom in order to shock. In one sense he has succeeded. I was shocked to the core to find a director of his standiing befouling the screen with such perverted nonsense. It wallows in the diseased urges of a homicidal pervert, and actually romanticises his pornographic brutality. Sparing no tricks, it uses phoney cinema artifice and heavy orchestral music to whip up a debased atmosphere . .. From its slumbering mildly salacious beginning to its appallingly masochistic and depraved climax, it is wholly evil. |
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| (Nina Hibbin, Daily Worker) |
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| Frankly beastly. |
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| (Financial Times) |
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| A thoroughly nasty piece of horror non-comic by the gifted but wayward Michael Powell... There has always been a morbid streak in Powell's best films- Red Shoes and Black Narcissus were two of them - but this time all is morbid, even to the point of photographing Moira Shearer, Anna Massey and Maxine Audley as though he had a grudge against them. The sorry theme has been dolled up in a flurry of trick effects with camera and lighting - another of Mr Powell's infatuations. |
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| (Fred Majdalany, Daily Mail) |
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| A clever but corrupt and empty exercise in shock tactics which displays a nervous fascination with the perversions it illustrates... Not only is it drivel, it is crude, unhealthy sensation at its worst. A sad discredit to a fine producer's reputation. |
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| (Alexander Walker, Evening Standard) |
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| Perhaps one would not be so disagreeably affected by this exercise in the lower regions of the psychopathic were it handled in a more bluntly debased fashion. One does not, after all, waste much indignation on the Draculas and Mummies and Stranglers of the last few years; the tongue-chopping and blood-sucking, disgusting as they may be, can often be dismissed as risible. Peeping Tom is another matter. It is made by a director of skill and sensibility... He did not write Peeping Tom ; but he cannot wash his hands of responsibility for this essentially vicious film. |
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| (Dilys Powell, Sunday Times) |
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, Moira Shearer 
, Anna Massey 
