Peyton Place (1957)
Somehow or other, adapting a famously dirty novel into a really long, not-nearly-dirty-enough movie qualified this movie to nab some Oscar nominations back in 1957. In fact it nabbed nine of them! I defy anyone to watch this movie and pick out one nomination that this movie deserved outside of Arthur Kennedy's effort as Best Actor in a Supporting Role Who Plays a Liquored Up School Janitor That Rapes and Impregnates His Step-daughter. He was definitely the best one in that category in 1957. Maybe even for 1958, too!
Surprisingly enough, the Oscars decided that year to suspend their usual rules of rewarding grandstanding trash and it was movies like The Bridge On The River Kwai that thumped the tortured souls of Peyton Place. In fact, Peyton Place went an incredible zero for nine and brought home nothing but the Oscar gift basket (and since this was 1957 that probably meant it was Schlitz and a carton of Lucky Strikes). Even in its futility though, Peyton Place isn't the best. Two other films actually got shut out with eleven nominations each (The Turning Point and The Color Purple).
Peyton Place is quite simply a laughably silly soaper that dates rather badly with its meager attempts to be risque by frequently referencing how everyone in town constantly thinks about sex. There were times when I thought that they were working some kind of verbal 3-D on me, heaving out the "sex" word every so often to jolt me, though invariably it made me cringe and wince simultaneously, kind of like when I hear anyone use the word "penis" or when Grandma is talking about her thong.
In fact, just about everyone in town is cast in terms of their sexuality. Lana Turner is a pent up cauldron of middle aged lust who just can't admit that the progressively wimpy new high school principal is all that she needs to unleash her long repressed inner-hellcat. Her lover has been dead for something like sixteen years and she now believes (as she so eloquently put it during a shouting match with Principal Rossi in her kitchen) that men are all about pawing women and only want one thing. At some point she also proclaims that men are "dirty" though I think all of us would glady stipulate to that fact.
For his part, Principal Rossi, incompetently portrayed by Lee Philips (acting tip for Lee: earnestness is not a substitute for charisma) is one of those guys who sees sex as merely a portion of a larger relationship. A healthy portion to be sure, but he tries to keep it in perspective, because you know how the ladies are (especially the old ones who've already been trickified by the guys who've plowed those fields before you showed up). He talks about how it just isn't about bumping uglies, but also about worrying about one another, standing up for each other, and trying out new sexual positions (though this is left unsaid, I think it's understood).
Lana has a teenage daughter, Allison and if this nympho principal she's dating isn't hard enough on her chastity belt's efforts to keep up the good fight, Allison is all over town doing stuff like kissing boys and swimming with them (and in the process getting mixed up in skinny dipping scandal). Luckily for Allison, the whole skinny dipping affair is pretty much forgotten about when she discovers that her maid has committed suicide by hanging herself in Allison's bedroom!
The maid's daughter is Allison's dirt poor best friend Selena Cross who lives in a tar paper shack on the wrong side of Peyton Place. Selena is played by Hope Lange, who we all remember from the silly Joan Crawford workplace melodrama The Best Of Everything. She was one of those new actors of the early sixties that 20th Century Fox hoped would become a star, but unless you count playing the wife in Death Wish, or starring in a couple of TV series (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and The New Dick Van Dyke Show) that didn't quite happen.
A couple of months after the rape, step dad gets frisky again and he chases poor old Selena through the woods and she ends up at the bottom of ravine. The next thing you know, the friendly neighborhood doctor is falsifying his records to show an appendectomy instead of a miscarriage. And what's a white trash mom to do now, but hang herself in her employer's daughter's bedroom?
Following all this, the upright doctor and town conscience confronts the step-father about his dirty deed! He cajoles a signed confession out of him and has that locked in his safe just in case he needs it for some surprise evidence at the murder trial you're laying even money that Selena will be having before the movie ends. Then he orders him to leave town (until the third act of course!)
What more does a big screen soap opera need besides a murder trial hinging on the revelation of salacious secrets? World War II, that's what! It turns out that this senior year of Allison's happens to be 1941, thus giving us some ready made and not truly earned tension as we watch the townspeople go through their seasonal events such as high school graduation and the Labor Day parade and festivities. Even as they go about their boring lives (really, does anyone care if Allison gets a job at the local paper or if the son of the mill owner marries the town tramp?), the prospect of war lingers in the air like a wet fart after an afternoon of Labor Day hot dogs and watermelon.
War comes, all the boys get drafted, and the town sissy, Norman, enlists in the paratroopers in order to free himself of a domineering mother. Norman? Domineering mother? His last name wouldn't happen to be Bates, would it? Strange as that is, what if I was to tell you that the skinny dipping took place at a body of water called Crystal Pond? What was the name of the body of water in the Friday the 13th series of films? Crystal Lake! Are the roots of all slasher films to found in this quaint and hot to trot little hamlet?
There's no time to consider the implications of marrying the sexually charged soap opera with the horror movie and what effect it had on desensitizing generations of kids so that now they run around getting pierced, laid, and jacked up on the junk, because even with the town tramp and the mill owner making amends after his kid and her husband got waxed by the Krauts, Selena's step dad returns on a pass from the navy and tries to have his way with her again. But this time it's a giant wooden club that has its way with his head. Eight times!
Eventually, Selena can't keep it to herself any longer and confesses to Lana that she killed her step-father and that he is now buried in the sheep pen out at her house. That was one of two or three belly laughs you'll get in this movie. One of the other ones is when the maid is wandering around Lana's house in a daze after discovering that her husband has raped her daughter and she's muttering about it over and over and Lana blows her off saying that everyone has problems (Lana had a squabble with Principal Priss). The hanging followed soon thereafter. Hi-freaking-larious!
A murder trial ensues where Lorne Greene is brought in to prosecute Selena who refuses to tell anyone about the rape which could sway the jury in her favor. Finally, her doctor demands to take the stand and unloads all he knows. Naturally, he takes the opportunity to indict the entire town for being a much of no-good gossip mongers and that they need to start caring for one another instead being all up in everybody's business. Hey, when the facts aren't on your side, sometimes you just have to shame the jury into an acquittal. It's why our system is the best in the world!
A story that is faux-racy and full of subplots that either go nowhere or aren't that interesting (Allison moves to New York to get away from Mom! Norman comes home from the war ready to set his mom straight! Lana opens up to Principal Rossi after she hears he might get a job in Portland!) combined with an astounding array of lead actors that can't get the job done (Lana's in full Joan Crawford Mommie Dearest mode, Lee Philips sometimes acts like English is his second language and at other times comes off like he's delivering a speech he memorized) make Peyton Place the place to be for fans of bloated, hammy epics of immorality and hypocrisy!