This is Carl Boehm (left) as Martin Lewis, in Peeping Tom (live link to original, cheesy 1959 preview), directed by Michael Powell, half of The Archers. It's "terrific" in all senses of the word--both awesome and terror-making (though visually mild by today's standards). One of the most interesting movies about movies I've ever seen.
Martin is a young cameraman whose father tormented him on film. In a somewhat simplistic Freudian turn (popular in the era? reminiscent, anyway, of Hitchcock's 1945 Spellbound), Martin developed a sexually psychotic form of scopophilia, the "love of looking," or voyeurism, that drives him to capture the fear of others on film.
He films women as he kills them with a blade hidden in a leg of his tripod.
"Do you know what the most frightening thing in the world is?" he asks. "It's fear."
To amplify his victims' fear, he has mounted a mirror on his camera, so the women see their own terror reflected back at them.
The critical reception of the movie when it came out was so hostile, the distributor pulled the film from circulation. Powell later said the reaction contributed to the demise of his career.
Peeping Tom is no more graphic than Hitchcock's Psycho, which came out three months later; but it hits closer to home for film -critics/-makers/-viewers, as it's all about the fine line between looking and ... breaking and entering.
(Something Twisted Rib brought up recently: when is it OK to take and use pictures of people without their permission?)
Peeping Tom is not at all graphic--there's not even any blood when Martin stabs his victims in the neck--but it can still shock. Helen, the young woman Martin is sweetly and innocently falling in love with kisses him lightly on the mouth, probably the first time he's been kissed, you suspect. When the Helen leaves, Martin gently presses the lens of the camera to his lips.
It's weirdly startling and erotic.
As is the scene when he strokes his camera (pictured here) as Helen talks to him.
Part of the fascination of watching the film is that you're watching a movie about how watching movies can border on perversion, and it's made by filmmakers who are, presumably, also film watchers.
Definitely the sort of movie you could write a PhD dissertation on.
Further, Martin is presented so sympathetically, I found myself having to remind myself there was no way this film was going to have a happy ending.
This is a curious movie that raises the question about what our modern technology does to us, psychologically, in allowing us to extend our powers so very far beyond our own bodies.
To feed my own love of looking, I've added a bunch of Hitchcock's early British films (The Lodger, et al.) on my Netflix queue. Oh, and some of the early German films that influenced Powell, like M, which I haven't seen in years.