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SPAM Published in 1956, Grace Metalious's Peyton Place hit America like a bombshell. If snob reviewers found the surprisingly unsexy novel no more than a homegrown writer telling dirty secrets about a small New England town, many other critics and most readers experienced it as a microcosm of what was and still is going on in small town America. Think Sarah Palin. By 1966, the unaccidental exposé had sold a then-unprecedented ten million copies (very soon to be overshadowed by Jackie Susann), and has had periodic sales surges ever since and even major universities and colleges have bestowed respectability by offering courses which require its reading and critical discussion. And similar to “fatal attraction,” the designation “Peyton Place” would move with the speed of light into our lexicon, the term(s) used as encompassing truism, thumbnail putdown. (Suggested reading about the author and her impact: David Halberstam's The Fifties and Kenneth C. Davis's Two Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America.) When the movie rights were sold, 20th Century Fox, producer Jerry Wald, screenwriter John Michael Hayes and director Mark Robson were smart enough not to fiddle around too much with the tasty morsels, though one major change is still unaccounted for and somehow missed by the smartasses in the user comments section over at IMDb: Lana Turner's Constance MacKenzie has no lover named Tomas Makris—about whom author Grace seemed to have it real bad—but instead one named Michael Rossi, played by Lee Phillips, who could easily pass as an attractive version of that Newsweek political gossip Michael Isikoff. (This much is known: the name wasn't changed because of Lana's disastrous relationship with Johnny Stompanato; the movie was filmed in mid 1957, released in December of that year and Stompanato's death was in April, 1958, though the scandal had a spectacular impact on box office.) Sex—budding, illicit, incestuous—remains the panting come-on and it's given a picturesque soap opera busybodyiness, and audiences even now relish the good time they're having in whooping it up over the screamers, some verbatim from the novel, the others from Hayes. Turner's biggest problems aren't her fears about her daughter Allison, or Rossi's desire to put sex back into her boring matronly life, or that as the town's high school principal he wants to put sex education into the classroom, which she strongly objects to, but her hairdos: what supposed man trap-tramp ever lost it to this much Aqua Net? 1957 was a bummer year for good performances, explaining why the following cans of Spam were Oscar-nominated: sticky-haired Turner (who'd give a much more convincing performance at the Stompanato inquest), Diane Varsi as Allison, Arthur Kennedy's Lucas, Russ Tamblyn's Norman and, as Selena, Hope Lange for those eight swacks over Kennedy's head. After that guilt trip laid on all of us while testifying at Selena's trial, how could Lloyd Nolan have been omitted? Why Betty Field didn't make the cut after making the ultimate sacrifice in one of the MacKenzie closets is still a mystery. Text COPYRIGHT © 2009 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved. |