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The Look of Love
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Country/Year: U.K., 2013
Opening: July 3
Where: New York and Los Angeles
In Peeping Tom, michael Powell's 1959 study in scopophilia, the director incorporated a critique of pornography's secretive production and dissemination. The serial-killer protagonist takes sleazy glamour photos in a room above a newsagent's shop in Soho, London's red-light district. He's listening in when a fluttery old gent buys an album of "views" that the proprietor keeps concealed under the counter. Notwithstanding Miles Malleson's comic turn as the customer, the scene radiates a very English furtiveness. It was echoed in John Schlesinger^ A Kind of Loving in 1962 when typist June Ritchie is shocked to find a tawdry "girlie" magazine in boyfriend Alan Bates's inside jacket pocket.
The man who defused this atmosphere of shame was Paul Raymond, the subject of Michael Winterbottom's biopic. Raymond fought the censorship brigade to line his pockets, not from a sense of social outrage. A onetime black marketeer and showbiz mind-reader...