Director Ken Loach has done it again. “Sorry We Missed You” is a family drama infused with a searing look at life in the “gig economy” with a frayed social safety net. Like his previous film, “I, Daniel Blake,” this movie is about working class people maintaining their dignity and humanity in the face of government austerity, privatization, and corporate greed.
“Sorry We Missed You” was just released in the U.S. through affiliated independent theaters, such as our Boston-area Coolidge Corner. A portion of the ticket price through virtual screenings support these theaters.
In the context of a pandemic, “Sorry” connects us to the frontline workers delivering packages and caring for the elderly and disabled — workers who are grossly underpaid while being at greatest risk.
Set in Newcastle, UK, the film takes its name from the package delivery slip that Ricky, the father in a family of four, leaves when no one is home to sign for a package.
Like most workers in the U.S. and UK, Ricky and his spouse Abbie are still struggling to get out of debt a decade after the 2008 economic meltdown. Abbie works as a home care nurse, hopping buses between visits to up to eight patients a day. Ricky takes a job as a driver with a package delivery service. Both work hard and with integrity. Abbie says she cares for her patients “how she’d like people to treat her own mother.”
Like workers at Uber, DoorDash, and other similar delivery services, Ricky’s employment status is in the limbo between employee and independent contractor. Maloney, the boss man who manages the package distribution facility, makes it clear: Ricky isn’t an employee, but a “franchisee,” a self-employed delivery driver. This status requires him to take on all the risks, including purchasing a van, leasing a delivery scanner, and toiling unlimited hours. The scanner serves as the symbol of the surveillance economy that enables the company to monitor Ricky’s every turn. Yet the company also fines him for late deliveries and, when robbers smash Ricky’s delivery scanner, they assess him a £1,000 charge.
Ricky and Abbie attempt to mind their two children, Seb and Lisa Jane, often via phone and text. The children absorb the stresses of their parents, who work 12 to 16 hour days to survive.
Director Loach balances a family story while dramatizing the structural forces that drive the gig economy and pit workers against each other. When one delivery driver struggles with family issues, the boss Maloney offers his route up to other drivers. Breaching the thin whisper of solidarity between the drivers, Ricky takes the other driver’s more lucrative route. Meanwhile, one of Abbie’s nursing patients shares photos and stories from her struggles as a labor union activist, a reminder of the past solidarity that existed among workers. “What happened to the eight-hour day?” she asks.
Maloney celebrates his own tough-guy unwillingness to bend to meet Ricky’s need for an emergency day off, saying the “shareholders of the trucking depot should build a [expletive] statue of me here.” Maloney also blames the customers, saying to Ricky, “do any of them ask you how you are? They just want their package delivered on time for as cheap as possible.” We have met the enemy, and it is in part the consumer who expects to pay less and get it now, with no understanding of the social costs of convenience.
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, we are more dependent than ever on those who drive the delivery trucks, who bring the packages, who stock the shelves, and attend to those in need.
“Sorry We Missed You” dramatizes why we need a system where all workers have universal health insurance, living wages, and paid family leave. And we need stronger protections against employers who restructure their enterprises to extract more wealth, while shifting costs on to workers and the rest of us.
British TV films of the 1970s were obsessed with landscape. Getting their hands on 16mm cameras, directors gravitated towards rural realms in order to tell the most surreal and unusual of stories. Whether it be BBC Ghost Stories, Play for Today episodes or one-off films, the countryside never seemed so strange or omnipresent a setting as it did back then.
With a large part of its narrative set in the Dorset countryside, it’s unsurprising then to find Geoffrey Household’s tense 1939 novel, Rogue Male, adapted in this period. Clive Donner’s version, scripted by Frederic Raphael (Far from the Madding Crowd; Eyes Wide Shut) and now released on Blu-ray and DVD, is one of the strongest evocations of landscape of the time. The film shows how people must adapt to their role in an increasingly dangerous pre-war ecosystem, one that’s predicated on notions of survival of the fittest.
Broadcast on BBC2 on 22 November 1976, Rogue Male follows the misfortunes of sporting aristocrat Sir Robert Hunter (Peter O’Toole). On a suspiciously random trip to the continent, he is caught aiming his rifle at Adolf Hitler (Michael Sheard) and only misses by chance. Escaping the clutches of the Nazis after being caught and tortured by the Gestapo, Hunter makes his way slowly back to Britain, soon believing that he’s safe on his home turf. But, on finding that he has been followed by Nazi agents, and with little help from his politician uncle (Alastair Sim), he’s forced to flee from London to Dorset. Here he must confront his pursuers and the memories from his past that first motivated him to take aim at the Führer.
Household’s novel was first adapted by Fritz Lang as Man Hunt in 1941, with a screenplay by Dudley Nichols. But in Lang’s film, the landscape is less of a vital presence. Donner – known previously for the 1963 film of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker and the swinging 60s romp Here We Go round the Mulberry Bush (1968) – is more aware of the inherent symbolism in Household’s original novel, and more concerned with the detail the author went into in describing the Dorset topography. His film matches this detail with a gritty but effective rendering of the hills and holloways where Hunter hides out, filling the scenes with sustained shots of the land: the only reliable constant in Hunter’s world.
Rogue Male’s script is filled with double entendres regarding the role of Hunter, who becomes more and more animalistic as the film progresses. His torment at the hands of the Gestapo turns him into a creature not unlike the animals he himself used to hunt. Even when he’s back in England, a country where we see walls scrawled with pro-fascist graffiti, he is “not out of the woods yet”. Later, he is described as having “gone to ground”, a fox-hunting term that implies he is no longer fleeing but in hiding.
All of these detail a subtle devolution in Hunter’s relationship with the land, from his mastery of it as a predator to scurrying with ingenuity as prey. He even wrote a book about the skill of hunting – much to his own misfortune, as it becomes the key that his chief pursuer, Quive-Smith (John Standing), uses to track him down.
With Hunter trapped underground in a warren of his own making, the imagery can’t help but remind us of the animated version of Richard Adams’ Watership Down (1978), with its equally subterranean battleground between the liberal and the totalitarian. Rogue Male’s very setting also recalls Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May, broadcast in January of the same year. Like a comedic inversion of Hunter, Leigh’s fastidious camper, Keith (Roger Sloman), also ends up foraging in the undergrowth after battling against ulterior – albeit antisocial – forces.
Unlike Keith, however, who never comes to terms with his lower placement in the Dorset landscape, Hunter adapts his way to freedom. Sir Robert knows, though, that for the next hunt he must be predator rather than prey, as the stakes will never be higher.
The 1970s have always occupied a grim place in the British imagination. Sandwiched between Harold Wilson’s utopian “Swinging Sixties” and Thatcher’s anti-social eighties, the decade represents a time of tremendous turbulence and change. With the empire in ruins, anti-colonial backlash came home to roost as Northern Ireland descended into civil war and the IRA began its bombing campaign in Britain. The naked enthusiasm of the post-war consensus dissipated, and the battle between labor and industry heated up. Bombs, blackouts, and shortages recalled war-like conditions during a time of supposed peace. Modern scholarship has pointed to an eerie style in British cultural output from the period. From its cinema to its television to its public information films, there pervades a gothic sensibility commonly identified with Mark Fisher’s concept of “hauntology,” the idea that the present state of cultural paralysis is a function of a collective mourning for futures that never materialized.
The dark and mystic sensibility that emerged from this disruptive and paranoid milieu, now called “folk horror,” manifests a fear of sublimation—the absorption of the individual into the mass, the human into the environment, modernity into the unknown. While the horror of Hammer Films and Roger Corman that had dominated the ‘50s and ‘60s was preoccupied with endless combinations of 19th century gothic, folk horror steps outside time as we understand it, beyond the scope of the human. In the 2010 documentary series A History of Horror, Mark Gatiss outlined a rough canon for this folk horror tradition based on the unholy trilogy of Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973). Intense ideological conflict pervades these stories: Witchfinder General is set in and around the Battle of Naseby, where Cromwell’s revolutionary New Model Army destroyed the veteran feudal forces of King Charles, and tells the story of a soldier who pursues a charlatan witch-hunter across the English countryside. And in The Blood on Satan’s Claw, set around the same time, a secular magistrate must slay a demon summoned from “the forest, from the furrows, from the fields” by the local pagan cult.
These historical tales come at us from the dawn of modern time, in the midst of feudal collapse and the emergence of capitalism. Our heroes are rational, secular agents of the state; our villains the ancient forces of paganistic superstition that batter at the door of our burgeoning technological world. It’s telling that the only film in Gatiss’s trilogy set in contemporary times, The Wicker Man, advances a very different view of the battle between the rational modern and the primordial other. Here, the heroic agent of the state, in this case a police officer, dies alone in the flames of the titular effigy, while the villagers dance in rings around him. Christopher Lee would go on to insist that The Wicker Man was not actually a horror film, an assertion that hints at the sublimation of genre itself, and how this paranoid affect had settled over the British imagination like an eerie fog.
Well before The Wicker Man hit theaters, however, there was the television play Robin Redbreast (1970), which tells a similar story: middle-class metropolitan Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper) ventures into the English countryside only to find herself caught up in the fatal fertility rites of the polytheistic locals. Robin Redbreast is noteworthy for its appearance on Play for Today, a BBC anthology series typically reserved for kitchen-sink realist drama that has been described in posterity as everything from a “national theatre of the air” to an “[exercise] in viewer patronisation” (the latter quote coming from current Conservative Party MP and Boris Johnson ally, Michael Gove). Abrasive, polemical, socially conscious to a fault, its moral messaging embodied the paternalistic spirit of the ‘60s welfare state. If television was the medium of the masses, Play for Today was its conscience.
Set in the present day, Robin Redbreast inverts the conventional relationship between the modern and the un-modern, configuring our world as hopelessly encompassed by a dark architecture of the outside. From the moment Norah arrives in the village, she’s deprived of all agency. Everything she does is preempted, public and private spaces are intermeshed—the villagers always seem to know what she’s doing in advance, repeatedly wander onto her property without invitation, and even orchestrate events so that she ends up sleeping with Rob (Andy Bradford), an awkward local man who she first encounters practicing karate naked in the woods.
Norah can sense she’s being manipulated in some way but remains powerless to stop it. The menacing Mr. Fisher (Bernard Hepton), apparent leader of the community, even explains their sinister designs, albeit in elliptical language, at various junctures. Yet Norah is unable to resist literal and metaphorical seduction by the strange persuasions of the village folk. There’s a dark implication that in some respect Norah wants, or is at least allowing herself, to be trapped. The heightened emotions of country life contrast starkly against the bourgeois detachment of her conversations with city friends. To an extent, we get the impression that Norah’s volatile relationship with the villagers is a reaction to her own suppressed Dionysian impulses.
The shadowed social commentary is compounded when Fisher explains that the villagers are under no pretense of doing justice to the “old ways.” He admits the basis of the robin sacrifice could be Greek, Egyptian, even Mexican in origin. He mentions James George Frazer’s “The Golden Bough,” a largely discredited work of comparative mythology that serves as the basis for most popular representations of paganism. Historical authenticity is immaterial here. What scares us about paganism is what it tells us about ourselves, how it recalls our own innate strangeness.
After the ritual slaughter of Rob (short for Robin), a pregnant Norah flees the village, but her escape will never be complete. She knows that the same cycle will repeat itself when her baby, the new robin, comes of age. As she drives away, she looks back to find that the villagers, still watching from the cottage, have transformed into pagan deities. The fact that the villagers do nothing to stop her from returning to the city amplifies the play’s paranoid pessimism. As Fisher, having taken the form of Herne the Hunter, watches Norah disappear over the hill, the viewer is left with the horrible feeling that nothing Norah can do will have any impact on the ultimate fate of her unborn child. (The narrative is clearly inspired in part by Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby).
Robin Redbreast’s horror is reactive, bird-brained—evoking the feeling of being cornered. The great fear is a lack of control, the feeling of being swept away by strange currents beyond the self. Even in her fleeing, Norah’s fate is ultimately foreclosed by forces that not only surround her but exist elementally within her. If Witchfinder General is set at the dawn of modernity, Robin Redbreast is set at modernity’s dusk, in a world that shrinks from itself as it feels the darkness loom ahead. The postponed reclamation of the robin proves a compelling metaphor for the hopeless uncertainty of a historical moment in which strange futures pounded on the door of the present, threatening to break in at any moment.
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The first three years of the 1970s would see five states of emergency, each presided over by Ted Heath’s Conservative government following its surprise election in 1970, and each involving battles between Heath and what Thatcher would later refer to as “the enemy within”—the labor movement. Problems continued to pile up, each new disruption amplifying the last. The stock market crashed in January 1973, sending inflation soaring into double figures; then, in October, OPEC declared an oil embargo that set the western world reeling. Seeing an opportunity, the National Union of Mineworkers voted to go on strike in pursuit of fairer pay. Heath’s government responded by introducing the infamous Three-Day Week, in which consumption of electricity was to be limited to three non-consecutive days per week to conserve coal supplies. For two months, Britain was plunged into a cold, dark winter unlike anything it had seen since wartime.
Described by The Times as a “fight to the death between the government and the miners,” this was the second large-scale confrontation in as many years and one the government couldn’t afford to lose. Heath resolved to call an election to serve as a referendum on the issue of union power, with the Conservatives campaigning on the slogan “Who governs Britain?” The election of February 28, 1974 returned yet another dramatic development: despite the weight of the media and the state behind them, the Conservatives had in fact lost ground and handed the Labour Party a plurality in parliament. A settlement was soon reached in which the strikers secured a 35% pay-increase—the miners had won, at least for now.
Two weeks after the lifting of restrictions, millions of Britons tuned in to BBC1 to watch the latest installment of Play for Today. That evening’s episode was Penda’s Fen, a fittingly unsettling exploration of unsettling times, the most developed folk horror film to date, and a triumph of public programming in its own right. Writer David Rudkin gives voice to the dark song of the fields with a visionary script about a devout young Christian who must confront both the unseen forces that stir beneath the village where he lives and the “unnatural” desires that emerge contrary to his pious pretensions.
Stephen Franklin (Spencer Banks) is a boy possessed by the “new gods”—he is ordered, anal, orthodox, patriotic, loyal to the structures of church and state. He’s the kind of kid that almost deserves the vicious bullying he gets from his grammar school classmates. As Stephen matures into his eighteenth year, however, things fall apart as he discovers that he’s both gay and adopted. Through the mentorship of his heretical parson father, a politically radical local playwright, and a series of disturbing apparitions, he begins to come to terms with his inner “ungovernableness.”
Director Alan Clarke, Britain’s mirror-holder-in-chief behind such brutal portraits as Elephant (1989) and Made in Britain (1982), presents an image of Britishness that’s wild, diverse, almost ethereal. Clarke, typically known for his uncompromising realism, adopts a more hallucinogenic style to portray the metaphysical turbulence of Stephen’s new understandings. The haunted, shifting landscapes of Worcestershire work as a kind of demonic mutation of Situationist psychogeography. Whereas the students of May 1968 were implored to uncover “the beach beneath the streets,” Clarke and Rudkin invite us to discover the flames beneath the fen.
Penda’s Fen stands apart from other artifacts of the “wyrd” in its overt politicization of strangeness. Almost immediately we meet the playwright Arne (Ian Hogg) as he puts up a one-man defense of the strikers at a town hall debate, while naïve Little Englander Stephen huffs and puffs in the audience. As Stephen begins to lose, or rather relinquish, control of himself, his grades suffer and his mother warns him not to fall foul of “the machine,” the inhuman conveyor belt of modernity and its cult of productivity. Later, the Reverend Franklin (John Atkinson) expounds on Moloch as the sun sets behind him, explaining to Stephen how the new gods of industry and institutions are perversions that have disfigured the message of the “revolutionary” Jesus. The Reverend speculates that the people may “revolt from the monolith and come back to the village,” noting that “pagan” means “of the village,” contrasting with what it means to be “of the city”—”bourgeois.”
The provisional nature of modernity is a key theme. Arne speaks of the urban behemoth swelling to a great city that will “[choke] the globe from pole to pole” but that will also “bear the seed of its own destruction.” We might imagine Hobbes’s Leviathan, bloated and turgid, decomposing back into the earth. Elsewhere, Stephen and his father discuss King Penda, the last pagan ruler of Britain. The Reverend reimagines the heretic as a transcendent symbol of resistance, wondering aloud what secrets he took with him when he fell. “The machine,” like the meaty bodies of its busy multitudes, is imagined as just one combination among an infinite number, an entirely temporary arrangement destined for the dirt.
Landscape is a focal point of the play but, unlike in our other examples, here serves as a vector of elemental truth rather than a source of corruption. Rudkin draws on the Gothic and Romantic traditions to conjure up an English countryside pregnant with ancient histories that lie unknown, hidden or forgotten. It was here, after all, in the 16th century, that the machine first emerged out of the fields and the fens and separated the peasantry from the land—the original trauma that encloses the margins of modern Western history. What lies beyond that temporal boundary is the vanishing realm of nightmare, of un-modernity, where yawns the black abyss of the unknown, the domain of animal and reigning wilderness. But, paradoxically, that abyss is essential to our nature—it’s where billions of lives were lived, where our minds and bodies were wrought and cultivated. Penda’s Fen considers the abyss for all its hidden potentials and reconfigures rupture as opportunity. The horror of recognizing the self in the other, or vice versa, is imagined as a route to emancipation.
In perhaps the most famous scene, Stephen awakes from a homoerotic dream to discover a demonic entity straddling him in his bed, which then takes the shape of the local milkman (Ron Smerczak). What haunts him is not his sexuality but his dedication to the authoritarian norms of middle-class Protestant England. As Arne prophecies in a later scene, the only way to purge ourselves of these demons and reach salvation is by way of “chaos” and “disobedience,” to summon our basest selves.
When we first find Stephen, he’s alone in his room, listening to his favorite composer Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius and reflecting on the moment when the protagonist meets God. Stephen is isolated from the world, only able to theorize obliquely about transcendent experiences. By contrast, the final sequence sees him meet his maker on an open hillside—not God, per se, but King Penda himself, the half-real spirit of “ungovernableness,” who tells him to go forth and “be strange.”
Much like its predecessors, the play makes no attempt at an authentic depiction of pre-Christian spirituality—we have no idea what the titular King Penda might have believed, what his traditions were, what cosmologies were lost when he was defeated all those years ago. But this is precisely the point. The last pagan king functions as an empty vector of “possibilities” and “unknown elements,” much like Stephen himself. Despite being an apparition of a long-dead historical figure, King Penda represents a haunting from the future, that dark domain of the beyond with which we are in contact every moment of our lives, full of unthinkable potential and inherent strangeness.
Penda’s Fen advances itself as the spiritual resolution to the folk horror cycle, a psychic exorcism of the demons that haunted the ‘70s. Rudkin’s play summons the future from the past, reconstituting the volatility of its day as a rite of passage into a new world. Horror in this sense denotes contact with new terrain, communion between the self and the beyond. To be comfortable is to live in fear of the strange invasions that confront us at every moment and in every thought and experience—to flee from ourselves. In a time when people want change without having to confront the proverbial milkman, the play enjoys continued relevance long after its first life.
Both Robin Redbreast and Penda’s Fen were aired only once more on British television, in 1971 and 1990 respectively, lending these tales the ephemeral quality of weird dreams dreamt long ago—and raising the question of why they’ve now returned to haunt us. The villagers never came to reclaim the robin in the end, yet still we see their shapes in the window and hear strange knocks at the door. Will we ever face up to the horrors that guard the margins of our world? Or are we, like Norah Palmer, doomed to retreat further and further into the city, to delay the inevitable day when the outside closes in? In the closing scene of Rudkin’s play, King Penda prophesies exile as the sun sets behind him: “Night is falling; your land and mine goes down into a darkness now… but the flame still flickers in the fen.” The future promised by that strange flame lies lost somewhere in that expanse of night. Only by embracing the dark might we find it again.
The movies make us into voyeurs. We sit in the dark, watching other people’s lives. It is the bargain the cinema strikes with us, although most films are too well-behaved to mention it.
Michael Powell‘s “Peeping Tom,” a 1960 movie about a man who filmed his victims as they died, broke the rules and crossed the line. It was so loathed on its first release that it was pulled from theaters, and effectively ended the career of one of Britain’s greatest directors.
Why did critics and the public hate it so? I think because it didn’t allow the audience to lurk anonymously in the dark, but implicated us in the voyeurism of the title character.
Martin Scorsese once said that this movie, and Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2,” contain all that can be said about directing. The Fellini film is about the world of deals and scripts and show biz, and the Powell is about the deep psychological process at work when a filmmaker tells his actors to do as he commands, while he stands in the shadows and watches.
Scorsese is Powell’s most famous admirer. As a child, he studied the films of “the Archers”–the team of director Powell and writer Emric Pressburger. Scorsese haunted the late show screenings of their films, drinking in Powell’s bold images and confident, unexpected story development.
It is a movie about looking. Its central character is a focus puller at a British movie studio; his job is to tend the camera, as an acolyte might assist at the mass. His secret life involves filming women with a camera that has a knife concealed in its tripod; as they realize their fate, he films their faces, and watches the footage over and over in the darkness of his rooms. He is working on a “documentary,” he tells people, and only in the film’s final shot do we realize it is not only about his crimes, but about his death. He does not spare himself the fate of his victims.
This man, named Mark Lewis, has been made into a pitiful monster by his own upbringing. When Helen (Anna Massey), the friendly girl who lives downstairs, shows an interest in his work, he shows her films taken by his father. Films of Mark as a little boy, awakened in the night by a flashlight in his eyes. Films of his father dropping lizards onto his bedclothes as he slept.
Tapes of his frightened cries. Mark’s father, a psychologist specializing in the subject of fear, used his son for his experiments. When a police psychologist learns the story, he muses, “He has his father’s eyes … ”
There is more. We see little Mark filmed beside his mother’s dead body. Six weeks later, another film, as his father remarries. (Wheels within wheels: The father is played by Michael Powell. Mark’s childhood home is the London house where Powell was reared, and Mark as a child is played by Powell’s son.) At the wedding, Mark’s father gives him a camera as a present.
For Mark, the areas of sex, pain, fear and filmmaking are connected. He identifies with his camera so much that when Helen kisses him, he responds by kissing the lens of his camera. When a policeman handles Mark’s camera, Mark’s hands and eyes restlessly mirror the officer’s moves, as if Mark’s body yearns for the camera and is governed by it. When Helen tries to decide whether she should wear a piece of jewelry on the shoulder or at the neckline, Mark’s hands touch his own body in the same places, as if he is a camera, recording her gestures.
Powell originally thought to cast Laurence Harvey in the lead, but he settled instead on Karl Boehm, an Austrian actor with such a slight accent in English that it sounds more like diffidence. Boehm was blond, handsome, soft and tentative; Powell was interested to learn that his new star was the son of the famous symphony conductor. He might know something of overbearing fathers.
Boehm’s performance creates a vicious killer, who is shy and wounded. The movie despises him, yet sympathizes with him. He is a very lonely man.
He lives upstairs in a rooming house. The first room is conventional, with a table, a bed, a kitchen area. The second room is like a mad scientist’s laboratory, with cameras and film equipment, a laboratory, a screening area, obscure equipment hanging from the ceiling.
Helen is startled when he reveals that the house is his childhood home, and he is the landlord: “You? But you walk around as if you can’t afford the rent.” Helen lives with her mother (Maxine Audley), who is alcoholic and blind, and listens to Mark’s footsteps. When Helen tells her mother they’re going out together, her mother says, “I don’t trust a man who walks so softly.” Later Mark surprises the mother inside his inner room, and she cuts right to the heart of his secret: “I visit this room every night. The blind always visit the rooms they live under. What am I seeing, Mark?”
Powell’s film was released just months before “Psycho” (1960), another shocking film by a British director. Hitchcock’s film arguably had even more depraved subject matter than Powell’s, and yet it was a boost for his career, perhaps because audiences expected the macabre from Hitchcock but Powell was more identified with elegant and stylized films.
There is a major sequence in “Peeping Tom” that Hitchcock might have envied. After hours at the film studio, Mark persuades an extra (Moira Shearer) to stay behind so he can film her dancing. She is almost giddy to have her own solo shots, and dances around a set and even into a big blue trunk. The next day, the body is discovered inside the trunk–while Mark, unseen, films the discovery.
The film’s visual strategies implicate the audience in Mark’s voyeurism. The opening shot is through Mark’s viewfinder. Later, we see the same footage in Mark’s screening room, in a remarkable shot from behind Mark’s head. As the camera pulls back, the image on the screen moves in for a closeup, so the face of the victim effectively remains the same size as Mark’s head shrinks. In one shot, Powell shows us a member of the audience being diminished by the power of the cinematic vision. Other movies let us enjoy voyeurism; this one extracts a price.
Powell (1905-1990) was a director who loved rich colors, and “Peeping Tom” is shot in a saturated Technicolor with shots such as one where a victim’s body under a bright red blanket stands out against the gray street. He was a virtuoso of camera use, and in “Peeping Tom” the basic strategy is to always suggest that we are not just seeing, but looking. His film is a masterpiece precisely because it doesn’t let us off the hook, like all of those silly teenage slasher movies do. We cannot laugh and keep our distance: We are forced to acknowledge that we watch, horrified but fascinated.
“Peeping Tom” essentially finished Powell’s career, although he made more films. By the late 1970s, however, Scorsese was sponsoring revivals and restorations, and joined Powell on the audio commentary tracks of several laser discs. Indeed, Powell and Scorsese’s editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, fell in love and married, and she assisted him in writing the most remarkable directorial autobiographies, A Life in Movies and Million-Dollar Movie.
“Billy Budd” (1962) is a British drama produced, directed, and co-written by Peter Ustinov. In this film adaptation of the stage play of Herman Melville’s short novel of the same name, young Billy Budd (Terence Stamp) is conscripted by the British navy during wartime where his charisma and integrity quickly makes him a trusted crew member. However, master-at-arms Claggart (Robert Ryan), secretly jealous of Billy’s natural leadership skills, conspires to frame him for mutiny.
After the Crash 