Peyton Place | Lana Turner, Lee Philips

Peyton Place | Lana Turner, Lee Philips | PEYTON PLACE (1957) is a movie to treasure

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Peyton Place

	Peyton Place Lana Turner, Lee Philips 20th Century Fox, 2004 average customer review:based on 63 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Without Compare

Mark Robson is definitely one of Hollywood's least respected directors but I could watch his films over and over again. It's a scandal that he is not better known or loved. He could take trash, like PEYTON PLACE or VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, and whip it up into something with emotional resonance, and he could direct actors easily as well as Sidney Lumet (for example). All of his pictures are worthy, but it is PEYTON PLACE which has lasted longest in our imaginations. For many it has replaced the earlier KINGS ROW (also a good film) as "the" sexpose of small town American life, its seamy side and its hidden scandals behind the lace curtains.

The casting is pretty great, even where it's fairly ludicrous, like asking Lana Turner to play a woman afraid of sex. Lana should have won the Oscar for this part, that is clear, and her handling of the deeply neurotic Constance McKenzie is always spot on. I think she might actually have won if she had been playing opposite someone other than Fox discovery Lee Philips, fine here but without the spark of a true star. Lana's especially good in the one scene where she comes home unexpectedly and Alison is having a hot spin the bottle party with lovers pairing off together in the shadows of the living room, while the LPs spin and the couples are slow dancing and drinking booze.

The young people are terrific, especially Hope Lange playing against type as Selina, and Russ Tamblyn also playing against type as the neurotic (gay?) mama's boy. Terry Moore may be a bit old to be playing teenage Betty Anderson, but she throws her sexuality all over the place and has a ball doing so. She's also interesting on the commentary, with a lot of stories and still very much an exotic, like someone from the day of Lili St. Cyr or Tempest Storm. Diane Varsi is appropriately twisted playing Alison Mackenzie. Among the adult characters, no one in the movies of the 1950s was as scary as Arthur Kennedy playing the man who rapes his own stepdaughter, ugh, how repulsive is that.

The movie is beautiful on every level; the photography is dreamy and resonant, like Franz Waxman's haunting music. And with all its flaws, PEYTON PLACE has some of the virtues of the old fashioned Victorian three-decker novel: it tells a cross stitched quilt of sin, memory and ultimately, the forgiveness without which none of us can learn to live.

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PEYTON PLACE (1957) is a movie to treasure

I think it is the Americana montages that make the Jerry Wald/Mark Robson production of PEYTON PLACE (1957, Fox) my favorite small-town America soap opera of all time. Grace Metalious' scuzzy and scandalous best-selling novel has been carefully adapted by John Michael Hayes (REAR WINDOW and other 1950's Hitchcock gems). Hampered by censorship that would not allow Selena (Oscar nominee Hope Lange) to have an abortion, it becomes a secret miscarriage and a public appendectomy. Sex scenes become romantic kisses in a vertical position. This is one movie that was actually improved by censorship that forced producer Wald, director Robson, and writer Hayes (all Oscar nominees here) to get more creative. The movie garnered nine Oscar nominations in all, lost all of them in the finals to either THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI or SAYONARA, and was a box office blockbuster that vastly improves on the trashy novel.

(CAUTION--PLOT SPOILERS THROUGHOUT!) Partially filmed in Camden and other very scenic coastal Maine locations, PEYTON PLACE opens with first-person narration by very likeable heroine Allison Mackenzie (Oscar nominated newcomer Diane Varsi) about the beauty of the seasons in her town. She is then seen having a hasty breakfast with Mom Constance (Best Actress Oscar nominee Lana Turner) before she runs off to high school. Seeming drifter Mike Rossi (Lee Phillips) arrives by car in town and witnesses the son of brutal Lucas Cross (Oscar nominee Arthur Kennedy) and wife Nellie (Betty Field) leave home. Nellie works as the Mackenzie maid. Lucas is the alcoholic school janitor. One of my favorite scenes is a montage of Allison running through backyards and the woods to get to high school, backed by one of Franz Waxman's loveliest scores and William Mellor's beautiful use of CinemaScope.

At school, Mildred Dunnock (Miss Thornton) teaches twelfth grade and is expected to be the new Principal. But Mike Rossi becomes the new school Principal. We also meet other school board members, including kindly town doctor Doc Swain (Lloyd Nolan in a career performance) and Harrington (Leon Ames), who runs a textile mill that is the town's biggest industry. In Miss Thornton's classroom, we also meet nice guy male hero Norman Page (Oscar nominee Russ Tamblyn). So in just the first reel, we are introduced to almost all of the major characters. Norman and Allison are an appealing central couple. Radiating out from them are Selena and David Nelson, Constance and Mike Rossi (whose book sex scenes are reduced to forced kisses), and bad girl Betty Anderson (Terry Moore) and Harrington's horny son Rodney (Barry Coe) for more dramatic tension and later misunderstandings.

(PLOT SPOILERS-BEWARE!) The rest of a well-paced and engrossing film masterpiece follows these different couples all over town for 157 minutes. Selena gets raped by her stepfather Lucas, resulting in the miscarriage that is publicly called an appendectomy. Allison wants to be a writer. David Nelson wants to be a lawyer. Since the time period here is World War Two, Norman and Rodney both go off to fight overseas. There is a beautiful high school dance to Auld Lang Syne and an exquisite montage of boats on Maine's Penobscot Bay and the glory of Summer after a nostalgic high school graduation.

There is also an extended sequence in the film's middle for Labor Day that rivals Labor Day in PICNIC (1955) as the finest ever put on film-singers, school parades, watermelon and hot dogs. When Constance and Mike watch a man put a ship into a bottle, then share a lobster dinner on the bay, backed by Waxman's music, PEYTON PLACE comes very close to being my favorite movie of all time. There is also "Beautiful Dreamer" and rowboats on one river, and two very different couples swimming in a lake outside of Peyton Place, leading to a major misunderstanding. That 20 minute Labor Day sequence is unforgettably evocative, but followed by something gripping and Allison leaving town to become a professional writer.
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The climax of PEYTON PLACE, roughly the last half hour of 157 minutes, is a court trial. I won't tell you who is on trial or for what-we have to have some surprises left in this review-but it has Lloyd Nolan's greatest scene as Doc Swain and a satisfying ending. The finale to the movie is one of my all-time favorites (PARTIAL PLOT SPOILER). The final shot is exquisite and euphoric for me, with Allison's voice-over: "We finally discovered that Season of Love. It is only found in someone else's heart. Right now, someone is looking everywhere for it, and it is in you," with two children riding bikes down a shaded Maine street and Waxman's gorgeous score again. (NINE Oscar nominations, but not one for the unforgettably beautiful music score?!)

The 1957 Wald/Robson PEYTON PLACE, acted and written to perfection, is a soap opera masterpiece with a very compelling and rewarding plot and some of the most beautiful Americana montages ever put on film. The DVD sells for only $14.95, with audio commentary by surviving cast members Tamblyn and Moore, restored color, lovely remastered music, and glorious CinemaScope letterboxing after decades of cropped pan/scan images. You can finally appreciate William Mellor's use of color and use of wide screen on a movie heavily filmed on both coastal Maine locations (including a lockout mountain scene that is awesome) and the Fox backlot in what is now Los Angeles' Century City. Most of all is a perfect cast down to the bit roles, under Mark Robson's skillful direction.

PEYTON PLACE, one of my ten favorite movies ever, is a must-see and must-own on DVD when you have a three hour time slot. Actually longer than 157 minutes because of a 30 minute behind-the-scenes featurette, newsreels, and a theatrical trailer (so you can see how the movie was promoted).

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A classic soap!

"Peyton Place" is one of the best movie soap operas ever made.
It's 1950s filmmaking in top form.Jerry Wald's Technicolor and
CinemaScope production is terrific,and Mark Robson's strong
direction is perfect.The entire cast is brilliant,but two of
them really stand out.Lana Turner gives her best performance,
while Hope Lange steals the movie as a haunting and wonderfully
touching Selena.On top of all this,Franz Waxman contributes one
of the loveliest and most memorable scores in movie history(that
main theme is a gem!).This is how to film a novel!

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Racy and exciting melodrama - but Lana's miscast

The filmed version of the famously shocking and successful bestseller is a little tamer than its literary parent, but still very racy and excting viewing. Even today the frankness of some of the stories is astounding - and all the moreso because this film was made in the '50s.

Firstly, the photography is sublime. The Maine locations are beautiful and the natural perfection of the town is an excellent and jolting counterpoint for the seedy storylines in which the town's participants are involved. All of the film's exteriors (except, very joltingly, for Lana Turner's scenes) was shot on location. The fact that Turner's scenes were obviously shot on a soundstage when the rest of the film was not is one of the few aspects that does date this film.

Single mom Lana Turner (in goregeous costumes and looking glamorously radiant throughout - in fact, far too glamorous for the part) is having problems with her clever but sexually curious teenage daughter Diane Varsi, who is involved with the hunky but smothered mommy's boy Russ Tamblyn. The daughter's best friend, lovely Hope Lange, daughter of Lana's cleaner, comes from the wrong side of the tracks and has her own problems, not least of which is her lecherous stepfather (Arthur Kennedy). Like most of the characters, Turner has a secret from her past, which initially inhibits her relationship with an unvconventional school principal.

"Peyton Place" is a long but riveting soap operatic film, still compulsively watcheable today. The only flaw is the lovely Lana, who, despite her own sordid private life which assured the film its great success, is simply too glamorous and thus miscast as a small-town single mother. Her inclination toward artifice was used to great effect in "Imitation of Life" a few years later, but in this particular part Lana is plainly ineffective with her Hollywood gloss and her "big" acting style.

The younger actors are all excellent and there are many moments to commend this interesting and visually goregeous film.

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sudsy melodrama supreme

Twentieth Century-Fox's film version of PEYTON PLACE (based on the novel by Grace Metalious, adapted for the screen by John Michael Hayes) remains an enjoyable sudsy melodrama, full of fantastic performances including Oscar-nominated turns from Lana Turner, Diane Varsi, Russ Tamblyn, Hope Lange and Arthur Kennedy.

The lives of the residents of Peyton Place, a small New Hampshire hamlet, are exposed in this movie which was once considered the epitome of scandal. Looking back the film is much more tame than what we would see today, nevertheless certain scenes still contain a raw intensity. Lana Turner's performance does sometimes border on camp, but would we have her any other way? She's fabulous here in Technicolor.

The film focuses on strait-laced single mother Constance MacKenzie (Lana Turner) who is struggling to bring up her intelligent-yet troubled daughter Alison (the equally-troubled young starlet Diane Varsi). Alison's quiet romance with the shy Norman Page (Russ Tamblyn) comes to a premature end when the local gossips wrongly accuse the couple of swimming in the nude. Feeling suffocated by small-town morality (and discovering the truth about her father), Alison disowns her mother and moves to New York to become a writer. Meanwhile the frosty, repressed nature of Constance threatens to ruin a romance with the new high-school headmaster Michael Rossi (Lee Phillips).

We also zero in on the poor Cross family: Lucas (Arthur Kennedy) a drunkard who rapes and beats his stepdaughter Selena (Hope Lange). When Selena finally snaps and kills her tormentor, the town is thrown head-first into a murder trial.

Other roles are taken by Lloyd Nolan (as the trustworthy Dr Swain), Terry Moore (as the town tramp Betty Anderson), Scotty Morrow (as Selena's brother Joey), Betty Field (as Selena's mother Nellie) and Mildred Dunnock as beloved teacher Miss Thornton.

Mark Robson, who also directed the legendary sud-fest VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, gives this movie the same sort of feel. The score by Franz Waxman is very stirring, and the CinemaScope photography executed by William Mellor is superb. Running a hefty two-and-a-half-hours, the pace of the film never drags or lulls and cracks along at a good pace.

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