Peyton Place (film)

Less than a month after the novel's release in October 1956, producer Jerry Wald bought the rights from author Grace Metalious for $250,000 and hired her as a story consultant on the film, though he had no intention of allowing her to contribute anything to the production.[8] Her presence in Hollywood ensured the project additional publicity, but Metalious soon felt out of place there.[9] "I regarded the men who made Peyton Place as workers in a gigantic flesh factory," she recalled, "and they looked upon me as a nut who should go back to the farm."[10]

The screenplay, by John Michael Hayes, omits many of the novel's sexually explicit moments,[10] because Hayes was working under the Hays Code, which restricted depictions of content the U.S. Motion Picture Production Code deemed explicit.

Metalious was horrified by what she deemed a sanitized version of her novel, and was also displeased with the thought of the casting of Pat Boone as Norman Page (the role was eventually given to Russ Tamblyn). She returned to her home in Gilmanton, New Hampshire,[11] and publicly derided the film, though she eventually earned a total of $400,000 in exhibition profits from it.[11]

Principal photography of Peyton Place began on June 4, 1957.[12] The film's exterior sequences were shot primarily in mid-coastal Maine, mostly in Camden, Maine, with additional exteriors filmed in Belfast, Maine; Rockland, Maine; Thomaston, Maine;[7] and Lake Placid, New York.[13] Additional interior photography was completed on film sets in Los Angeles.[14] All of Turner's scenes were shot in California.[15]

The film's score is by Franz Waxman, and was recorded by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.[10][16] The score was released on CD for the first time in 1999.[16] In 2016, journalist Graydon Carter praised the score as "haunting" and "instantly recognizable even today."[10] In 2005, the American Film Institute recognized the score in its 100 Years of Film Scores, for which it received a nomination.[17]

Track listing

The film premiered in Camden one day before opening in 24 cities across the U.S. on December 12, 1957.[1][2]

Peyton Place was the second highest-grossing film released in the United States in 1957, and received significant public interest in April 1958, after Lana Turner's daughter, Cheryl, killed Turner's abusive boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, during a domestic struggle.[18] Though Cheryl was acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide, the press coverage boosted ticket sales for Peyton Place by 32% in April 1958.[19] The film ultimately earned $11 million in domestic rentals[20] (equivalent to $114,613,744 in 2022).

Peyton Place was a commercial hit, but many critics noted that the most salacious elements of Metalious's novel had been whitewashed or excised completely.[21] In The New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote, "There is no sense of massive corruption here", but he did like the film overall, praising Hope Lange's "gentle and sensitive performance" and finding Lloyd Nolan "excellent."[22] Variety wrote that the film was "impressively acted by an excellent cast" but noted that "in leaning backwards not to offend, Wald and Hayes have gone acrobatic ... On the screen is not the unpleasant sex-secret little town against which Grace Metalious set her story. These aren't the gossiping, spiteful, immoral people she portrayed. There are hints of this in the film, but only hints."[23] Richard L. Coe of The Washington Post wrote, "While the four-letter words of the Grace Metalious novel have been adroitly erased, it's easy for one of the apparent few who didn't read the book to see why so many did. There are several strong stories and the characters are sharply drawn. Without these two characteristics the best written novels remain unread."[24] Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times called the film "probably the most powerful small-town picture ever produced"[25] and Harrison's Reports praised it as "an absorbing adult drama" that "grips one's attention the whole time it is on the screen, thanks to the sensitive direction and the effective acting of the capable cast."[26]

John McCarten of The New Yorker wrote that the film "makes no attempt to exploit the sensational aspects of the tale it has to tell; on the contrary, it is woefully diffuse, and before it's over—roughly, three hours—boredom has set in like the grippe."[27] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote, "Slick and passionless, the film is an expensive and heavily bowdlerised adaptation of Grace Metalious' best-seller", adding that "the film never quite makes up its mind whether to extol small-town America or castigate it."[28] TV Guide wrote, "This is the kind of hypertensive trash that gives melodrama a bad name, cynically tempering its naughty bits with smug moralizing. The fact that the film won an 'A' rating from the Catholic Legion of Decency, meaning it was deemed 'acceptable to all,' is a dead giveaway."[29] (In actuality, it was given an "A-III" rating, meaning appropriate only for adults.)[30]

In the years since its release, critics have continued to comment on the film's sterilized screenplay, though Graydon Carter wrote in 2016, "Despite the movie's almost picture-postcard tone of whimsy, it did manage to retain some of Grace's finger-pointing—most notably in a stunning montage of duplicitous citizens filing into a myriad of churches, all dressed in their Sunday best."[31]

The film received nine Academy Award nominations and no wins, tying a record set by The Little Foxes. This was later surpassed by The Turning Point and The Color Purple, both of which received 11 nominations and no wins.

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released Peyton Place on DVD in 2004, featuring an audio commentary by Terry Moore and Russ Tamblyn, an AMC-produced documentary on the film, and vintage newsreel footage.[35] The film had its debut on Blu-ray in 2017 by Twilight Time, in an edition limited to 3,000 copies.[36] The Blu-ray repurposes the bonus materials from the 20th Century Fox DVD, and adds a new commentary by filmmaker and historian Willard Carroll.[36]