Anytime Movies #11: Edge of Darkness (1985)

While I catch up on the reviews still in "Draft" phase here, I'll re-run a feature I ran when I first started this blog seven years ago,* when it was suggested I do a "Top Ten" List.

I don't like those: they're rather arbitrary; they pit films against each other, and there's always one or two that should be on the list that aren't because something better shoved it down the trash-bin.

So, I came up with this: "Anytime" Movies.

Anytime Movies are the movies I can watch anytime, anywhere. If I see a second of it, I can identify it. If it shows up on television, my attention is focused on it until the conclusion. Sometimes it’s the direction, sometimes it’s the writing, sometimes it’s the acting, sometimes it’s just the idea behind it, but these are the movies I can watch again and again (and again!) and never tire of them. There are ten (kinda). They're not in any particular order, but the #1 movie IS the #1 movie. And we begin in as contrary a way as possible (so as to avoid any comparison to a "Top Ten" list). This one is unusual in that it's a bonus (like the joke in This is Spinal Tap, "Anytime Movies" go all the way up to eleven). 

And that's not all that's different about this entry:

What the hell is this? It’s not a classic movie!

Oh, it’s worse than that! It’s not even a movie! It’s a British mini-series.

Okay, so what’s so special about it that it squeezes into the “Wild Card” position of the “Anytime Movies” list over, say, Casablanca or Gone With the Wind, or your favorite film?

1. It’s a police procedural, as steeped in the gritty realism of shabby interrogation rooms and bad neon-tube-lighting as “NYPD Blue” or “Prime Suspect.”

2. It’s a spy story, with rogue undercover operatives (particularly an eccentric CIA operative by the name of Darius Jedburgh, played in the performance of his career by Joe Don Baker), chases (two stand out--an edge-of-your-seat hacking exercise, and another through an abandoned nuclear facility) and intrigue on the part of government, and commerce.

3. It’s a political thriller, with investigations into government corruption and collaboration with a privatized nuclear industry, that involves Union-busting, suppression of environmental groups, and murder.

4. It’s a revenge story, as a police investigator attempts to find who murdered his daughter...or whether the bullet was meant for him?.

5. It’s a ghost story, as that murdered daughter keeps coming back to advise and inspire her father’s efforts, as he sinks deeper and deeper into an ever-expanding investigation, that, in the real world, he is being encouraged to abandon.

6. It’s a psychological thriller—because maybe she isn’t really there, and is just a figment of his severe grief.

7. It’s a black comedy—it has some of the most absurd sequences ever put to film (a sumptuous dinner in an underground "hot" room), and some of the funniest lines ("He's in the field," but you have to be there).

8. On top of that, it’s a story of myth, although grounded in reality, for, impossibly, one of the main protagonists (and an alarming participant in the story) would appear to be the Earth goddess, Gaea.

9. It has one of the best performances I’ve ever seen, by the hawk-faced Bob Peck (you might remember him as the game warden Muldoon in Jurassic Park. You don’t? One line: “Clever girrrl…” Now you know him)

10. It crosses genres, and expectations and always keeps you guessing not only what will happen next, but what COULD happen next. It seems to revel in going 90° from normal at every juncture. It is truly a thrilling film.

11. It has one of the most down-beat endings ever put to film. But it’s okay—it's assured the bad guys will lose. The Good Earth will win.

After years of kvetching about there being no DVD release, BBC Home Entertainment finally released an impressive 2 disc set of this one in 2009, directed by Martin Campbell, who ushered in two new James Bonds in two of the best movies in the series and the two Antonio Banderas Zorro films (and, subsequently, the theatrical film version with Mel Gibson, which doesn't compare). One should also make note of the exceptional Troy Kennedy-Martin screenplay, and the music by the late Michael Kamen and Eric Clapton. Peck is gone now, as well, and it would have been nice to see him in other things, so good is he in this. But it’s another in a long string of sad eventualities for this odd, crazy, thrilling piece of film-making.

You gotta love the British. We could never do this in the States.

They deserve the Falklands.

Craven (Bob Peck) finds a gun in his dead daughter's teddy-bear.

Northmoor - a site dedicated to "Edge of Darkness"

"Edge of Darkness" at the IMDB

Anytime Movies:
Bonus: Edge of Darkness

* And, on Sunday, we'll put up a "Don't Make a Scene" feature from each week's film.

Peeping Tom

Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm, actually Karlheinz Böhm) is never without his camera—a camera of some kind, still or film. A shy young man, he works as a "focus-puller", hoping to become a film-maker. In his other job, he takes pin-up shots of models to be sold "under the counter" in plain brown envelopes. Photography is his passion, his aspiration, his raison d'etre. But, it is also a means to end.

For his hobby is terrorizing and killing women.

Mark is one of those people who, during a newscast of a lurid incident, it is always remarked "he seemed like such a nice young man—kept to himself." The intensity is never mentioned, though, or the creepiness. But, just  the fact that Mark ALWAYS has a camera with him should raise an alert.

It certainly should tip off Dora (Brenda Bruce), a prostitute Mark follows one night. Or maybe it shouldn't. He hides his movie camera under his coat (hmm..I sense a metaphor-based film thesis in the works) and we see what happens from the point of view of the view-finder, as he encounters on the street, follows her to her flat, and then murders her, filming it, then skulking off to his house, where he develops the film and watches it, transfixed...or turned on...or what? It's difficult to say exactly what is going on with this monster, but since we're watching the film...we're accessories. 

Peeping Tom (as the title suggests) is about voyeurism at it's cruel dark little heart. Mark "likes to watch." Not participate, really, but watch. To record and see it over and over again. He's a vicious killer, a sociopath, but as long as the camera is between him and his victims, there's a filter there, responsibility-once-removed, and all for the sake of "art," his footage is to be part of a documentary he is making—or at least recording—paralleling his experiences as a child as his father (played by director Powell) runs psychological experiments on him, while a documenting camera records the events. It is suggested (filmicly) that Mark is merely doing what he knows and is familiar with in his growing up. But, if so, where did he learn to kill?

And—like Mark—we watch, complicit in his actions. It adds another dimension to the experience of the movie. Perhaps it's a feeling of generated guilt that we're watching what he's watching—compounded by Mark's compulsion and utter lack of guilt—which gives us the universal experience of feeling out of control in the passive experience of watching a movie. You feel helpless when your instincts are challenged. This is a familiar feeling to anyone who's ever watched Hitchcock's voyeuristic classic, Rear Window.

And (it seems) you can't discuss Peeping Tom without also mentioning Hitchcock, whose film, Psycho, was released just two months after Powell's film.* Michael Powell had worked closely with Hitchcock during the director's "British"period, working as a still photographer on his shoots and the two were somewhat close throughout their careers. That they should simultaneously direct the most lurid films of their careers has more to do with the loosening of restraints in subject matter for film at the time than anything else. For Powell, whose career—as part of "The Archers" in collaboration with Emeric Pressburger—was a prestigious one, the subject matter of Peeping Tom was a departure from, say, The Red Shoes** or A Matter of Life and Death, although, it isn't too far afield from the hysteria of, say, Black Narcissus. But, the nuanced approach, the vital color palette, should be familiar to anyone familiar with the films produced by "The Archers."

Even as the movie makes us implicit voyeurs, we are also innocent bystanders, shocked by the new and the unexpected, looking for some sense of normalcy amidst all the creepiness. Peeping Tom provides this downstairs from Mark's austere flat—far more elaborate is his film room—where he rents out the ground floor of his family home to Helen (Anna Massey—who would be a victim in Hitchcock's Frenzy ten years later) and her blind mother (Maxine Audley) whom she cares for. Helen is empathetic towards the damaged, so she is drawn to mark for his shyness, his past—he shows her his father's home movies of his psychological experiments—and because she knows that he spies on her.

He might be drawn to her, too—or it's just because she shows him attention, which he's not accustomed to. Ego is a facet for both killers and film-makers, and perhaps she satisfies that need. Or she's just another victim for his secret hobby.

There's an added element to the murders that are noteworthy. Peeping Tom is full of reflections and refractions both in the film and the viewer's reaction to it. But, Mark's murder weapon is his own camera—one of the tripod's legs contains a sword with which he slays his victims—it serves double duty as both weapon and recorder. But the camera also holds a mirror to the victim, so they can see their own death, which own enhances the terror that Mark wants to record.

Peeping Tom is the complex daddy of the slasher films of the 1970's—which scaled the concept down to just a voyeuristic POV, unknowable killers and shock-cuts—but, even with the artistic sensibilities of Powell in play, it's still a creep-fest, that compels one to take a shower afterwards—that is, if Psycho isn't also on the double-bill.

* Peeping Tom received a critical thrashing in the press when it was released. Perhaps this is why Hitchcock did not have press previews of Psycho when it was released, instead emphasizing a "not-to-be-revealed" mystery in the film in its marketing to the public.

** The inclusion of the star of The Red Shoes, Moira Shearer, led to some controversy , as well.