Some of the "scandalous" book is here, incestuous rape, mainly. But most of the salacious content of Grace Metalious' barn-burner is conspicuously missing or only given the nod of allusion, as if book-readers were meant to fill in the blanks for themselves. Constance Mackenzie staggers her daughter with the information that she's illegitimate. Young Norman Page appears to be under the unhealthy influence of his own mother. The white-trash Cross family produces a daughter so alien to their environment, she comes off like Marilyn Munster. The young folks are sexually rambunctious, the parents are fanatically suspicious and the old folks are meddling gossipers.

Grace Metalious' bitter novel has a point: underneath the sweet complacency of every little town is a stench of sin and repression that 50s America is loath to acknowledge. The alienation she focuses on is sexual, just as other 'subversive' 50s cultural touchstones like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers are politically-based. Rip the lid from her original Peyton Place, and you'll find ugliness and hatred stamping out the few sparks of joy. Metalious made herself into a pariah by basing her story on real people in her own town - recognizably so. Books were still being banned in the 1950s, and she tapped into a more mainstream vein than did other authors that found fame in scandal, like Henry Miller.

Peyton Place the movie covers the book in a glaze of Hollywood glamour. The township of Peyton Place is too beautiful to be evil. The real trouble is isolated and would be easily rooted out if it weren't for old-fashioned suspicion and ignorant gossip. There's no ugliness in human nature, only tragic misunderstandings.

Obviously the movie couldn't depict the pages that were marked in everyone's copy of the book - the scenes with explicit descriptions of people lusting, having sex, and not being ashamed about it. One by one, the dangerous material is neutered. Two kids don't skinny-dip, the girl just wears a tan-colored bathing suit. An abortion is downgraded into a miscarriage, but a nurse is still scandalized as if it had been an abortion. The town bad girl becomes a misunderstood good girl. The implied incest theme with Norman Page is reduced to a rumor of a rumor.

So we're left with a torpid soap opera where selected sage spokemen like the liberal school principal or the wise old doctor played by Lloyd Nolan do their best to help the kids traumatized by the rest of the town. The implication is not that the place needs to be razed and sewn with salt, but that a little love and understanding will heal all wounds. Mark Robson was Val Lewton's least interesting disciple and his direction here plasters the film with a flat, pictorial neutrality. Here and there it resembles Picnic but it never approaches that picture's feeling of painful romantic hopelessness. Even with a handsome Franz Waxman score, the film drags through much of its two hours and thirty-six minutes.

The acting in Peyton Place is quite good. Lana Turner accepted her first "mother" part and got a best actress nomination from it, although the character of Constance MacKenzie is only in her thirties. I guess no stars wanted to play her pragmatic educator boyfriend, because Lee Philips is pretty thick in the role. He was even worse as an alcoholic jet pilot in the next year's The Hunters but eventually found himself in a long and successful career as a television director.

Arthur Kennedy's showoff turn as a degenerate shanty dad got a nomination, but so did Russ Tamblyn's neurotic kid Norman. He straightens out in the military, the Conservative's cure for all teen ills. Tamblyn and Kennedy's vote was split, so say the Oscar experts, guaranteeing that neither would win. Ditto for the bright young actresses Hope Lange and Diane Varsi. Lange already had movie experience and would continue with a varied career; the sensitive Varsi quit acting after a couple more interesting roles and then came back several years later to appear almost exclusively in AIP exploitation pictures. They're what's really worthwhile about seeing Peyton Place (a Lana Turner fan Savant is not). Nobody else stands out, even when each is given an emotional highlight.

The overboiled sexy soap approach was to continue in big-budget Hollywood pictures, with no end of teen-angst and dimestore Freud trotted out to make the exploitative subject acceptable. Delmer Daves practically absorbed the franchise with his 1960 super hit A Summer Place ('place', get it?). It combined Sandra Dee, repressive parents, vacant teen Troy Donohue and an unwanted pregnancy into a stew of confused morals and attractive context. Max Steiner's "let's pet" Theme From A Summer Place and the "innocent" chemistry between the youngsters probably accounted for a baby boom early the following year. Daves tried to repeat the formula in two more Troy Donohue losers (Parrish, Susan Slade) and not long thereafter the unfilmable Peyton Place became a humdrum television serial.

Fox presents Peyton Place in their Studio Classics line in a fine transfer that shows off the picture-postcard CinemaScope views of the photogenic Maine hamlet that stood in for Grace Metalious' home town. The audio track is solid. Either the elements for this picture aged well or have been nicely rejuvenated, because the DVD looks great.

The attractive transfer is matched by an excellent AMC Backstory program showing the arc of the Peyton franchise from scandalous book to oversold TV staple. It's interesting to hear how golden-boy producer Jerry Wald cagily put the movie together with a mix of old timers and new talent. Turner, the "torrid" star of a decade previous, soon became entangled with her daughter in her own scandalous court case. The docu has the right spirit, even if it doesn't quite peg Peyton Place for what it is, a cultural freak show.

Fox's packaging skips the film's latent camp value and aims for quality drama status, sidestepping less refined language by saying that Arthur Kennedy "traumatizes" Hope Lange. Since she's his stepdaughter, I guess it's technically not incest (?). The credit block on the disc includes Grace Metalious' name but the original advertising materials did not, which is very curious.

With the docu to fill us in on just what the fuss was about Peyton Place in 1957, this is a very entertaining and fun disc.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Peyton Place rates:
Movie: Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Commentary by Terry Moore and Russ Tamblyn; AMC Backstory: Peyton Place; Movietone Newsreels of Premiere and Photoplay Magazine awards
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: February 23, 2004