PEYTON PLACE (1957)

I've never read the scandalous novel this film was based on, but I do remember sneaking it down from my parents' bookshelves one day and looking for the "good parts." Most of those parts didn't make it to this movie, but it's still a surprisingly effective melodrama about the secrets and passions that lie simmering just below the surface of a small New England town in the 1940's. It's very episodic, so the best way in is to approach it through the characters. Lana Turner is Constance McKenzie, a respectable widow who owns a dress shop and is raising a daughter, Diane Varsi. Turner has a weird thing about sex--one discussion between mother and daughter threatens to turn into a scene from CARRIE with Piper Laurie and Sissy Spacek. Hope Lange is a poor girl who lives in a shack on the outskirts of town; her mother is Turner's cleaning lady and her stepfather (Arthur Kennedy) is a drunken brute who somehow manages to keep a job as janitor at the high school; Lee Philips, the new principal, gets interested in Turner, even though she comes on like an ice queen. Leon Ames is Mr. Harrington, the town big shot; Barry Coe is his frat-boy son (except that he joins the Army instead of going to college) and he has the hots for Terry Moore, the town slut. Russ Tamblyn is Norman, a neurotic mama's boy, and although he's stand-offish, he comes off as much healthier than most of the rest of the town's young people. Lloyd Nolan is the crusty old doctor with a heart of gold who delivers the movie's two main messages at the climax: Don’t believe everything you hear, and take care of your neighbors.

Most of the plotlines have to do with love, sex, and gossip: Turner hears gossip about her daughter swimming naked with Tamblyn and won't believe Varsi when she says it's not true; Kennedy rapes his stepdaughter and she winds up pregnant; Ames does not approve of his son's dalliance with Moore because of her reputation. There is a murder which becomes the center of the film's last third and helps to bring the moral messages into focus. The movie looks gorgeous, as good if not better than Douglas Sirk's glossy soap operas of the 50's, with some lovely Maine locations in the background. The actors are all just as sexy, handsome, and plain as they need to be, the plainest being Peg Hillias as the nastiest of the town gossips. Also in the cast are Mildred Dunnock as a frustrated teacher and David Nelson (of Ozzie and Harriet fame) as a soldier. Worth seeing, though it did make me want to see what ABC did to it when they turned it into TV's first prime-time soap opera in 1964. [DVD]