Michael Powell's centenary year has seen a major retrospective of his films at the BFI, and their publication of the first ever collection of essays on his work. Mark Venner casts an eye over Powell's career and his legacy of extraordinary and unsettling films.

Of the many howls of critical execration that greeted the release of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom in 1960, perhaps it is Isabel Quigly's review in the aptly named Spectator that best characterises them all, calling it 'the sickest and filthiest film I have ever seen!'. Yet this was the year that Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho had shocked and terrified audiences all over the world, and just one year after the release of unprecedented British horrors such as Robert Day's unbelievably gory Corridors of Blood and Arthur Crabtree's violent slasher Horrors of the Black Museum. So how was it that Powell's film, which featured little on screen violence and no gore whatsoever, became the film which enraged the critics and public to such a degree that the career of this great British director was effectively destroyed?

In his book English Gothic (2004), film historian Jonathan Rigby argues that Peeping Tom was the final straw for UK film critics who were traumatised by the growing sadistic content of British films. On the release of Hammer's Technicolor trip to the charnel house The Curse of Frankenstein (1956), the Daily Tribune howled that it was '...a peepshow of freaks interspersed with visits to the torture chamber. Depressing and degrading for anyone who loves cinema'; and yet Hammer Films soon went on to win the Queen's Award for Industry, while Terence Fisher, director of The Curse of Frankenstein and Hammer's only true auteur, enjoyed a spectacularly long and successful career, still directing films well into his seventies.

Perhaps a way of addressing the question of why Peeping Tom destroyed the career of one of the great directors of all time is to look back at some of the key films from his career, in particular the series of often overlooked yet brilliant and highly unusual films he made during the austere war years in Britain. No British director has as many genuine classics to his credit as Powell, and yet it is only in recent years that his prolific output has begun to receive any adequate critical appreciation. All but a handful of his films have remained unseen for many years and, aside from film historian Ian Christie, who has written four books on Powell and his writing partner Emeric Pressburger, surprisingly little about Michael Powell has appeared in print.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 107.