There is a point in the Broadway musical A Chorus Line where the characters enter a montage, shouting their frustrations over a choir of voices singing about the ravages of aging. While many are likely to remember “Tits. When am I going to grow tits?” there is one phrase that has been stuck in my head for quite a few years. It’s an amusing sidestep that I don’t know if I even understand right now as I write this:
“Locked in the bathroom with Peyton Place”
To be totally honest, it’s the type of reference that made me eager to explore the world first written by Grace Metalious. What does that mean? Is he stuck in the bathroom with the book, or is he having a rousing good time with someone (or, in a more radical read, the entire town)? Both scenarios work wonderfully, and I was hoping that indulging in the narrative would give me some clue.
While I am still eager to read the book, I finally got to see the 1957 film version, which feels like a strange and wondrous beast. On paper, it sounds like a story meant more for sleazy filmmakers like Otto Preminger, amping up the themes of murder, rape, miscarriages, and affairs. It’s definitely material that would properly get it labeled a soap opera that runs a near three hours. Though with all of that said, I am amazed by how edgy it is for a decade that was considered squeaky clean. On the one hand, the entire decade was about recontextualizing marriage going back to Adam’s Rib (1949) and building to something more obtuse with The Seven Year Itch (1955).
More importantly, I am still baffled that the film received NINE Academy Awards nominations. Are they all deserved? Yes. But when you think about it, the modern equivalents wouldn’t ever be considered a major contender, believing these themes to be in poor taste. Then again, I can’t think of how much of a box office hit the film was, serving as the second highest-grossing movie of 1957 and leading to a career-making soap opera TV series. People were obsessed with this style of small-town gossip and, I just want to state firmly and proudly, that I totally get the appeal of this film.
Even if it likely wasn’t a major tool at the time of the release, its Technicolor vision of New England has a classic beauty to it. If you take any of the various landscape shots, you would think that this is a wholesome city, shot so perfectly that any dark themes contrast so starkly against them. The costume work is magnificent and it captures the ideal form of what we think about when we think of 50s America. There’s a purity in their costumes, with everyone dressed so elegantly that they probably shine their shoes before leaving the house.
The atmosphere of this film is incredible. Add in a perfectly melodramatic Franz Waxman score, and you get a town that feels alive. You can understand why this was turned into a soap opera because to watch cars drive by the houses, you imagine what stories people in every one of those buildings have to share. Sure, most of them are mundane but imagine those that could fill the viewer with a certain shock. Underneath the ideals is a sense of corruption, something that feels more indicative of the counterculture ahead. This was a film hinting at a change, and it’s one that’s as much generational as it is thematic.
One of the more enjoyable comparisons that I’ve read for Peyton Place is to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Now, this may sound ridiculous, but consider what Lynch’s work generally focuses on. It’s about a moral decay underneath this idea of Americana, of purity and innocence. I feel it’s reflective in films like Wild at Heart (1990), where cultures from different eras are so warped that they may exist in a billowing inferno. Sure, Peyton Place is quaint by comparison, but it’s about the misrepresentation of the image, of contrasting what society wants compared to what it is. Peyton Place cherishes moral values and yet thrives in the downfall of their neighbor for their lack of them.
And, in a more obvious sense, both have the great Russ Tamblyn.
The most important tool that helps it avoid just being tacky entertainment, devoid of a deeper endearment, is how it handles the concept of a fading innocence. Because most audiences will look at the 1950s and think of Leave it to Beaver, this film gets an added benefit of seeming radical when placed alongside those sunshiny shows. This town may not be unfamiliar than ones that ran rampant in pop culture of the time, and yet contrasting it with these dark stories reveals the preciousness of innocence, that it’s something that won’t ever be preserved. Nowhere does that seem most clear than in a third act murder trial scene where a young child is called upon to discuss witnessing the assault of his sister.
Though to be fair, it starts in a different story with something that is much more innocent. Allison Mackenzie (Diane Varsi) is a teenage girl whose whole arc focuses on courtship. As she dates Norman Page (Tamblyn), she attends parties that devolving into make-out sessions, the risk of sex becoming more apparent at every turn. You can understand why her mother Constance (Lana Turner) is so worried about the purity of her daughter, worrying that pregnancy and disappointment lie on the outskirts of her life.
It’s the type of carefree relationship that causes the town to talk. As an elderly couple drives down the road, they see Norman and Allison preparing to swim in the lake. As they observe from their own mundane lives, they start a gossip mill, believing that their skinny dipping is impure. To reflect how small Peyton Place is, the gossip spreads and becomes the talk of the town. This otherwise milquetoast couple aren’t allowed to have their own promiscuous adventure. It’s only when Allison reveals that she has several hidden places within the town that she goes to escape criticism of the world that there's any happy escape.
It’s in moments like this that the camera gets the best views of Peyton Place. From atop a hill, over the trees, the camera pans over the lake and into the homes that are beautifully stacked next to each other, like a little playset. It’s an alluring force and one that draws the viewer in. Who wouldn’t want to live in a world with such beauty that overlooks something even grander? They have parades and the community, when brought together, feels like they’re plucked from a Norman Rockwell painting. Everything feels like small-town optimism, and I understand why it’s appealing. There aren’t any problems to worry about and the world can be perfect… if you ignore it.
Again, there is something to the cinematography that is undeniable and psychological when assessing the darker moments. This movie is beautiful, reflecting a purity that every character strives for. And yet, on the outskirts in an area of town that has long been neglected (it’s literally on the wrong side of the tracks), lives The Cross Family. Their son has a lizard named Pocahontas. Selena (Hope Lange) seems to have a normal life… until she gets home late. Her stepfather Lucas (Arthur Kennedy) is a belligerent drunk who eventually rapes her. That story is tragic, and one that fills the viewer with a desire to see him get murdered. He is an awful character and one that finally brings the town’s terribleness to the surface.
One can argue that this is a tired trope in the movie, where a woman has to suffer at the hand of a man for any sentiment to be drawn. That’s why there’s some relief that Selena eventually gets her own revenge, that the town is somehow capable of dealing with Lucas in ways that nowadays feels a bit off.
To go back to the cinematography, I want to highlight one scene of abuse between Lucas and Selena. As she escapes their cabin of a home, she runs into the forest. As the trees fly by, the beauty becomes haunting. The Waxman score grows somber and the sound of Lucas in the distance makes this into a horror movie. You pray that Selena escapes, worrying that the forest will never end and she’ll only die somewhere in the middle of this winding maze. Again, everything is so beautiful, so why is it filled with something so vitriol? The contrast is palpable, finding innocence rudely slashed from the text so that trees no longer hold sacred protection.
Which is strange because these all feel like side characters to Peyton Place. The city is not a character, but the people who live in it feel like the same archetype with different actors. As they attend carnivals, listen to stump speeches, and wander through local businesses, they participate in gossip, believing that they’re better than whoever is the victim of the day. They’re happy because it’s not happening to them. As they attend local dances, they gather to sing “Auld Lang Syne” and participate in the expectation, the belief that they’re morally just.
The whole experience of watching Peyton Place is strange because it’s a very dark movie that feels designed to disturb the viewer, reflecting how everyone falls victim to group thinking, willing to judge but rarely solve the problem. They push it under the rug, and it finally has snapped back. The choice to set this on the verge of World War II only makes the analogy clearer. Something will be lost when their young men go to combat, suffering from shell shock and not being able to relate to their peers.
On the one hand, the film is overtly sentimental in spite of its dark themes. It is first and foremost a melodrama, serving as one of the most provocative since Mildred Pierce (1945). Every moment shocks you, making you question your own neighborhood, and it’s amazing how addictive it all is. Still, there are places where this could’ve gone darker, become a grosser movie. It’s something Preminger or Lynch would’ve made, but I believe that it takes away from some of the richest subversion that I’ve seen. This film didn’t need to be near three hours, and yet allowing this town to make its case allows for an engrossing experience, encouraging the idea that America was never pure. It always had problems before the war, even before puberty. It’s just how we handle them.
I love this film as part of the 1950s subgenre that tackled societal problems through a Technicolor sheen. Underneath the melodrama of something like Monkey Business (1952) or Designing Woman (1957), you get stories of the gender politics shifting, of men feeling displaced as they grow older. Whereas most treated it with comedic brilliance, Peyton Place is one of the few that actually desired to look honestly at the picture. In that respect, it may still feel groundbreaking, tearing apart the very idea of fond nostalgia. If anything, it was evident that the real-life shell shock of WWII was still strong in the DNA, even during a time of perceived peace.
To be honest, I still long to read the book, which I assume goes further and darker. I imagine it’s a trashier read, that plays just like the town gossip that these characters stew in. However, I hope it also finds a strange and deeper humanity for this world that sometimes felt surface-level in the film. While I really like this story, I want to believe that there’s more to these taboos, that they’re more than shock value. The loss of innocence is one that hits hard no matter how it’s applied to a story, and this is a bittersweet one. Whereas I don’t imagine the book will have as rich scenic descriptions, I’m sure it will breathe more life into this world. I hope, more than anything, it will explain why we should all be locked in the bathroom. More than that, I’d like to know with who.
Comments
Post a Comment