Leo Marks, World War II codebreaker turned controversial screenwriter

In 1958, English film director Michael Powell was casting about for a new collaborator, having split two years earlier with his longtime partner, Emeric Pressburger, after the pair made Ill Met by Moonlight, released in 1957. Powell and Pressburger, who were fancifully known in their professional working relationship as "The Archers"?they shared direction/production/screenwriting credits?transformed British cinema in the 1940s and 1950s with a clutch of lauded and loved films, including A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948).

While putting the finishing touches on Honeymoon, his first effort since the demise of The Archers, Powell ran into producer Danny Angel, whose recent World War II espionage picture Carve Her Name with Pride had been well-received. As Powell recounts in 1992's Million Dollar Movie, the second volume of his extensive memoirs, Angel asked him, "Are you still looking for a writer to work with you, like Pressburger did? Because, if you are, you ought to see Leo Marks. He's as crazy as you are. He's been working with me [on Carve Her Name]. Apparently, he was a codebreaker during the war, and he tells the tallest stories about it that I've ever heard... He can write poetry. He's weird, I tell you. He lives double or triple lives, he's difficult to get ahold of, and he's full of mystery and conundrums."

All true. Freshly turned 38, Leo Marks?World War II codebreaker (and codemaker), poet, raconteur, mufti of the mysterioso with high-voltage connections in the British Intelligence Service?had enjoyed a smidgen of success in London's West End as a playwright with The Girl Who Couldn't Quite! (1947) and The Best Damn Lie (1957), and as a screenwriter with Cloudburst (1951) and Carve Her Name.

Born Leopold Samuel Marks in London on September 24, 1920, the only child of an antiquarian bookseller father, young Leo spent considerable time in his father's shop, Marks & Co., later made famous by Helene Hanff's 1970 epistolary memoir 84, Charing Cross Road, its address. Back then Marks & Co. counted among its patrons Charlie Chaplin, Aleister Crowley and Sigmund Freud. As an eight-year-old, Leo exhibited proficiency with ciphers, cracking his father's lettered pricing code penciled inside the shop's books.

In 1942 that ability enabled him, at the age of 22 and a civilian, to become head cryptographer with the Special Operations Executive, a secret agency established in 1940 at the behest of Winston Churchill. Its mandate: plant saboteurs equipped with two-way wireless radios into occupied Europe to subvert Germany's war operations. Entrusted with overseeing these agents' activities, Marks brainstormed brilliant codemaking innovations. When he joined SOE, Marks explains in his engrossing 1998 wartime memoir Between Silk and Cyanide, field operatives encoded their messages in poems by Tennyson, Keats, Racine et al. But the well-read Gestapo either readily broke such codes or tortured captured agents to learn their meaning. Fighting bureaucratic intransigence, Marks eventually persuaded his superiors to allow agents to compose their own poems, or, more often, use ones written by him; these would be less easily ascertained by the enemy. Then he suggested photographing rows of codes onto silk squares, visible only when illuminated by ultraviolet light; an agent detached one row, used it to send his or her message, then burned the small silk strip. Unlike the more conspicuous "one-time pads" employed previously, the silk squares proved difficult for the Gestapo to detect during body searches?plus, because there was no need for memorization, agents could not betray the codes under torture.

Simultaneously, Marks commanded an army of 400 young women, average age 20, from the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, training them to untangle the numerous "indecipherables" sent by agents?messages garbled because they were transmitted too quickly or in dark quarters or in a panic, with the Gestapo within sniffing range. Mistakes were common. Standard SOE procedure required agents to resend such messages at a prescribed time, but Marks railed against this practice, insisting that he and his pool of FANYs make sense of all indecipherables, even if it required tens of thousands of attempts per message?anything rather than force agents to risk discovery by activating their radios. He agonized over their fates. "When an agent was tortured," he told The New York Times in 1999, "we experienced the torture with him."

Marks knew many of these agents personally, having briefed them before they parachuted behind enemy lines. Often they were shot; others were tortured to death. "You could see an agent one night before he left on a mission and, three days later, read that the man had had his eyes taken out by an interrogator's fork," Marks confided to London's Daily Telegraph in 1998. But his efforts also saved countless operatives' lives, permitting them to wreak havoc (the destruction of the heavy-water facility in Norway where the Germans manufactured an essential A-bomb ingredient) and foment resistance (keeping enemy hordes hopping during the D-Day invasion). By the time he left SOE in 1946 to write plays and movie scripts, Marks had significantly altered the business of sending/receiving clandestine intelligence.

His postwar work drew copiously from his spy-guy exploits, particularly for Carve Her Name With Pride, the story of doomed agent Violette Szabo, to whom Marks gave his best-known code-poem, "The Life That I Have." Marks' harmonious dealings with producer Danny Angel on that film prompted Angel, in 1958, to recommend Marks to director Michael Powell. "We met," Powell writes. "We shook hands, and I wish we hadn't. He had a grip of iron... He had eyes like stones and crisp, curling black hair that looked like a wig but wasn't. He was short, square, and powerful. His clothes gave nothing away."

Not surprisingly, Marks pitched a movie about a WWII French double agent; Powell professed no interest in war yarns. Marks mentioned psychoanalysis, a personal interest; Powell bit, proposing a Freud biopic; Marks said he'd give it a think. But the pair scotched the idea a week later when director John Huston announced that he was making a Freud film. Soon thereafter Marks and Powell met again. "He sat down," Powell recalls in his book, "leaned toward me, fixed me with a penetrating gaze, and said, 'Mr. Powell, how would you like to make a film about a young man with a camera who kills the women that he photographs?'" They kicked around the idea.

Marks: "Does the word scoptophilia mean anything to you, Mr. Powell?"

Powell: "Is it Greek?"

Marks: "Yes, it's Greek."

Powell: "Love of looking? Urge to look?"

Marks: "Exactly: 'the morbid urge to gaze.'"

Powell: "Hmmm, the morbid urge to gaze?Peeping Tom."

Title determined, they went to work. "Leo was an ideal creative partner," Powell contends. "He knew nothing about films or the theater, but a very great deal about men and women. He was malicious, inventive, and unshockable." Marks hammered out a draft in six weeks: Shy twentysomething Mark Lewis (a blatant self-reference) works as a focus puller at a London film studio, supplementing his income by making still nudie photos of women, and in his spare time shooting his own "documentary." Attempting to record the face of fear, the face of death, Mark films young women?a hooker, a stand-in actress, a pinup model?as he murders them with a blade concealed in one of the legs of his tripod, inducing them to witness their own impaling in a distortion mirror attached to the top of his camera. Deeply disturbed, Mark bears emotional scars inflicted by his scientist father, who, in an effort to study fear, filmed simple but terrifying "experiments" he conducted on Mark as a boy. A downstairs neighbor, 21-year-old schoolteacher Helen, develops a crush on Mark, befriending him after he screens his father's films for her. But too late. The cops finally finger him and close in. A frenzied Mark grabs Helen and... well, that would be telling.

Powell set about securing financing and assembling his cast, relying mostly on relative unknowns, including Karl-Heinz Bohm (credited as Carl Boehm), son of renowned conductor Karl Bohm, as Mark, and Anna Massey, daughter of Powell's actor chum Raymond, as Helen. He snagged Moira Shearer, star of The Red Shoes, to play one of Mark's victims, and in an intrepid move cast himself as Mark's father and his own son, Columba, as eight-year-old Mark. Production began toward the end of 1959.

Peeping Tom opened at London's Plaza Cinema in May 1960, with Powell and Bohm in attendance; they waited in the lobby afterward, anticipating an amiable chat with friends. "They passed us with averted gaze," Powell sighs in his book. "It was obvious they just wanted to get off the hook, go home, and forget about it?and us." Bohm describes a similar scene in A Very British Psycho, a 1997 documentary about Marks: "There was deadly silence."

Shocked critics, on the other hand, convulsed with revulsion, loudly vilifying the film: Len Mosley in the Daily Express: "In the last three and a half months... I have carted my travel-stained carcass to some of the filthiest and most festering slums in Asia. But nothing, nothing, nothing?neither the hopeless leper colonies of East Pakistan, the back streets of Bombay nor the gutters of Calcutta?has left me with such a feeling of nausea and depression as I got this week while sitting through a new British film called Peeping Tom."

Caroline Lejeune (who bolted before the end) in The Observer: "It's a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom." Nina Hibbin in The Daily Worker: "From its slumbering, mildly salacious beginning to its appallingly masochistic and depraved climax, it is wholly evil." And, most famously, Derek Hill in the Tribune: "The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Even then, the stench would remain."

Nervous backers yanked the picture from the market after a week, suspending UK distribution. Powell never fully recovered. "His career was ruined, no doubt about it," notes his second wife, Thelma Schoonmaker, in an interview that accompanies the 1999 DVD release of Peeping Tom. He made several films for British tv (one with Marks, 1964's A Free Agent), and a handful for the big screen, including 1967's Sebastian (as coproducer), with Marks responsible for its screen story, a semiautobiographical account based on his time as a codemaster.

Less scalded, Marks dusted himself off and wrote screenplays intermittently through the early 70s?among them 1968's horror-mystery Twisted Nerve, as bent as Peeping Tom?before turning his attention to the publication of his WWII memoirs and a collection of his code-poems. Not forgetting his turn as the voice of Satan in Martin Scorsese's 1988 The Last Temptation of Christ.

For its part, Peeping Tom, slashed from 109 to 86 minutes, opened for a blink in the U.S. in May 1962, but in France, where it was shown in its entirety as Le Voyeur, the picture thrived, embraced by critics, especially future filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier (Round Midnight). Over the years it has experienced a radical rehabilitation in the UK and U.S., championed by critics, film scholars and directors?most prominently Scorsese?who cite its astute psychological undergirding, nuanced structure and theme of cinema's innately voyeuristic and assaultive nature. Powell once grandly termed it "a film about cinema, 1900 to 1960." Scorsese's rah-rahing landed a restored 35 mm version in the 1979 New York Film Festival, and the following year, under his aegis, Peeping Tom was rereleased here, playing in select cities.

By the time it was revived yet again in 1999, even The New York Times?which ignored it in 1962 and dismissed it in 1979?decreed Peeping Tom "visually elegant, endlessly perverse...its status as the kinkiest of cinema-conscious classics remains assured." And as evidence of its full acceptance, in 1997 the film aired for the first time on UK tv, together with A Very British Psycho.

More than 40 years after its original release, Peeping Tom retains its capacity to shock, while its implicit implication of moviegoers as Mark Lewis' silent accomplices still elicits squirming. In Leo Marks' worldview, one he steadfastly maintained until his death in London on January 15 at the age of 80, to a degree we're all voyeurs, sending, receiving and desperately trying to interpret "indecipherables."

"I wanted to disclose the character of Mark Lewis step by step to the audience," he explained to London's Guardian in 1997, "as if they were unraveling a code themselves?to understand finally what had driven this man to do what he did. By the end, I wanted Mark to be indecipherable to nobody?except, perhaps, himself."