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DVD Peyton Place
Nominated for nine Academy Awards in 1957, Peyton Place has become synonymous with torrid soap opera. Though the novel by Grace Metalious is even more sensational, the movie provides plenty of tantalizing story turns--secrets, adultery, rape, bitter parents, frustrated teenagers, suicide, and murder. Multiple storylines deftly interweave: Allison MacKenzie (Diane Varsi), an ambitious young girl struggling with the neurotic fears of her mother (Lana Turner, in a career-reviving performance) and the neurotic fears of the boy she loves (Russ Tamblyn), while her best friend Selena Cross (Hope Lange) fights off the brutal advances of her drunken stepfather. The movie had to sanitize the novel's New England town in order to get some of the more unsavory plot turns past the censors; ironically, the glossy "normal" surface makes these events all the more shocking, paving the way for David Lynch's Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. --Bret Fetzer
Thank you for the wonderful movie and interesting commentary. The German Code 2 DVD issue has no bonus feature.
I hope, the Serie "Peyton Place" and "Return to Peyton Place" coming out soon on DVD.
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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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.
Imitation of Life (1959) The last film in Hollywood of director Douglas Sirk (Written on the Wind), the 1959 Imitation of Life--an adaptation of Fannie Hurst's novel--is an endlessly fascinating film that speaks volumes about the American journey toward materialism and the racial tensions that are inseparable from it. Lana Turner plays a white single mother and aspiring actress who takes in a black housekeeper (Juanita Moore) and her daughter (played by an adolescent Susan Kohner), the latter so light-skinned she passes for white. As the years pass and success mounts for Turner, Moore also becomes more comfortable but her status as a domestic never changes. Meanwhile, Kohner's character, chafing against social constraints, rebels at every opportunity and throws a wrench... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Douglas Sirk - John M. Stahl DVD Release Date: Released the 10 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Leave Her to Heaven is one of the most unblinkingly perverse movies ever offered up as a prestige picture by a major studio in the golden age of Hollywood. Gene Tierney, whose lambent eyes, porcelain features, and sweep of healthy-American-girl hair customarily made her a 20th Century Fox icon of purity, scored an Oscar nomination playing a demonically obsessive daughter of privilege with her own monstrous notion of love. By the time she crosses eyebeams with popular novelist Cornel Wilde on a New Mexico-bound train, her jealous manipulations have driven her parents apart and her father to his grave. Well, no, not grave: Wilde soon gets to watch her gallop a glorious palomino across a red-rock horizon as she metronomically sows Dad's ashes to the winds. Mere screen moments later,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Cornel Wilde Director(s): John M. Stahl DVD Release Date: Released the 22 February 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Velvety and glazed like a fattening pastry, this 1954 love story concerns three American women who make wishes for love in Rome, and end up having three romances. The cast is fine, but as for the film, what you see is what you get. There's no mystery to any part of this movie--like everything director Jean Negulesco made once CinemaScope entered his life (e.g., How to Marry a Millionaire, A Certain Smile), Three Coins is designed to lull rather than stimulate. (It did, however, win Oscars for cinematography and the Jule Styne-Sammy Cahn title song performed by Frank Sinatra.) --Tom KeoghMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Clifton Webb - Dorothy McGuire Director(s): Jean Negulesco DVD Release Date: Released the 02 November 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Before he made the classic All About Eve, writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz made this clever story about three wives who spend an afternoon at a children's picnic mulling over a letter all three had just received, from a woman who says she's just run off with one of their husbands. As the wives--a former farm girl (Jeanne Crain), a radio soap opera writer (Ann Sothern), and a social climber from the wrong side of the tracks (Linda Darnell)--mull over the troubles of their marriages, each begins to think that she's the one left behind. A Letter to Three Wives doesn't have the crackling show-biz milieu of Eve, but it has the same mix of snappy dialogue and topnotch performances. The tone ranges from florid sentiment to unblinking cynicism, yet Mankiewicz... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Jeanne Crain - Linda Darnell - Ann Sothern Director(s): Joseph L. Mankiewicz DVD Release Date: Released the 22 February 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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