Peyton Place

Peyton Place (1957)

Small town America will never be the same again.

In the outwardly respectable New England community of Peyton Place, shopkeeper Constance McKenzie tries to make up for a past indiscretion -- which resulted in her illegitimate daughter Allison -- by adopting a chaste, prudish attitude towards all things sexual. In spite of herself, Constance can't help but be attracted to handsome new teacher Michael Rossi. Meanwhile, the restless Allison, who'd like to be as footloose and fancy-free as the town's "fast girl" Betty Anderson, falls sincerely in love with mixed-up mama's boy Norman Page.

Date of release
1957-12-13
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (98)
Runtime
2h 37m
Genres
Drama, Romance
Director
Mark Robson
Collection
Peyton Place Collection

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Peyton Place
  • Filmed in: Maine
  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 9

Peyton Place is a 1957 American drama film starring Lana Turner, Hope Lange, Lee Philips, Lloyd Nolan, Diane Varsi, Arthur Kennedy, Russ Tamblyn, and Terry Moore. Directed by Mark Robson, it follows the residents of a small fictional New England mill town in the years surrounding World War II, where scandal, homicide, suicide, incest, and moral hypocrisy belie its tranquil façade. It is based on Grace Metalious's bestselling 1956 novel of the same name.

Production

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. Her presence in Hollywood ensured the project additional publicity, but Metalious soon felt out of place there.

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

Mark Robson said the script "went through at least eleven drafts. The first one I read was about two hundred and sixty pages. While it was imperfect, and structurally wrong, still one could see that it was possible—with hard work—to pull it together. Jerry was tireless, and John Michael Hayes worked extremely hard; on a weekend he would rewrite a whole script. The final screenplay was written on the stage as the film was actually being made."

John Michael Hayes said "I tried to tell the story of the difficulty adolescents have passing through that invisible pane of glass as they become adults. I examined the turmoil they go through, especially in the town of Peyton Place. I was sympathetic to these young people. The first draft was nearly three hundred pages, and it took eight drafts to finally boil it down."

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, and publicly derided the film, though she eventually earned a total of $400,000 in exhibition profits from it.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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