Peyton Place (Mark Robson, 1957)

Lana Turner and Diane Varsi in Peyton Place

Cast: Lana Turner, Lee Philips, Diane Varsi, Hope Lange, Arthur Kennedy, Lloyd Nolan, Russ Tamblyn, Terry Moore, David Nelson, Barry Coe, Betty Field, Mildred Dunnock, Leon Ames, Lorne Greene. Screenplay: John Michael Hayes, based on a novel by Grace Metalious. Cinematography: William C. Mellor. Art direction: Jack Martin Smith, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: David Bretherton. Music: Franz Waxman.

Take the sex away from Grace Metalious's lurid novel Peyton Place and what you have left is a portrait of small-town narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy, very much in the tradition of fiction by much better writers, from Mark Twain to Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and William Faulkner. Squeezed by the strictures of the Production Code, the film version of the novel becomes a kind of reworking of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. There was narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy in Wilder's Grover's Corners, but only in the background. It bubbles to the surface in the adaptation of Metalious's novel, which replaces Wilder's heroine, the romantic Emily Webb, who loves her family and her town, with the embittered Allison MacKenzie (Diane Varsi), who hates not only the gossip-ridden town but also her mother, Constance (Lana Turner), for having withheld the information that Allison is the product of Constance's liaison with a married man. The film version of Peyton Place turns what in the novel was sexual molestation of a girl by her father into a rape by her stepfather, side-stepping the incest issue a bit, and converts an abortion into a miscarriage. The randy teenagers of the novel do nothing more shocking in the film than make out a bit and go skinny-dipping. The film hints a little that the shy mama's boy Norman Page (Russ Tamblyn) may be gay -- he refers to himself as a "sissy" once -- but relieves him of that stigma by having him join the paratroopers when war breaks out and come home bold and no longer shy. (It would never occur to Hollywood or its audiences of the day that a gay man could be bold and masculine.) In short, Peyton Place makes today's viewer do a lot of decoding. Which, aside from the fact that at 157 minutes it's overlong and a lot of the dialogue is heavy-handedly expository (and sometimes just banal), doesn't fatally undermine it as entertainment. There are some very good performances: Varsi, Turner, and Tamblyn received Oscar nominations, as did Arthur Kennedy as the slavering rapist stepfather, and Hope Lange as his victim-stepdaughter. Metalious, of course, hated it all the way to the bank.

The Annotated Pauline Kael¹: Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950)

John Dall and Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy

Annie Laurie Starr: Peggy Cummins
Barton Tare: John Dall
Packett: Berry Kroeger
Judge Willoughby: Morris Carnovsky
Ruby Tare Flagler: Anabel Shaw
Clyde Boston: Harry Lewis
Dave Allister: Nedrick Young
Bart Tare (age 14): Russ Tamblyn
Bluey-Bluey: Stanley Prager
Miss Wynn: Virginia Farmer
Miss Augustine Sifert: Anne O'Neal

Director: Joseph H. Lewis
Screenplay: MacKinlay Kantor, Dalton Trumbo (credited to Millard Kaufman)
Based on a story by MacKinlay Kantor
Cinematography: Russell Harlan
Production design: Gordon Wiles
Film editing: Harry W. Gerstad
Music: Victor Young

Gun Crazy   Originally called Deadly Is the Female. (1949)² -- Peggy Cummins and John Dall in a tawdry³ version of the Bonnie and Clyde⁴ story. Cummins is a really mean broad,⁵ whose partner is her desperately eager victim.⁶ In its B-picture way, it has a fascinating crumminess.⁷ With Morris Carnovsky, Berry Kroeger, Annabelle Shaw, and Don Beddoe.⁸ Directed by Joseph H. Lewis, from a screenplay based on MacKinlay Kantor's SatEvePost story, and credited to Kantor and Millard Kaufman. Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted at the time, later revealed that he wrote the script and persuaded Kaufman to let his name be used. Produced by Frank and Maurice King; released by United Artists. b & w 

-- from 5001 Nights at the Movies, 1982

¹From time to time, maybe, I thought it might be fun to break format and reprint some of Pauline Kael's reviews as a basis for my own reactions to specific movies I've just watched. Why Kael? Because she's still synonymous with film criticism from her heyday as the New Yorker's chief film critic in the 1970s and '80s. Some of her critiques no longer seem on point -- I don't value Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975) or Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972) nearly as highly as she does, and I think more highly of "art-house" directors like Michelangelo Antonioni than she does -- but they are always provocative even when dated.

²It was made in the spring of 1949 but not released until January 1950.

³I wouldn't call Gun Crazy "tawdry" in any sense of the word. Its production values are solid: Russell Harlan was a first-rate cinematographer, with six Oscar nominations (though no wins); film editor Harry W. Gerstad won his first Oscar in 1950 for Champion (Mark Robson, 1949) and another for High Noon (Fred Zinneman, 1952); and composer Victor Young was nominated 19 times and won (posthumously) for Around the World in 80 Days (Michael Anderson, 1956). Even when it ventures into sleazy locations like the carnival where Bart meets Laurie, the sleaze is kept to a minimum.

⁴An obvious comparison after the 1967 Arthur Penn film, though there's not much evidence that anyone connected with that movie had seen Gun Crazy, which fell into obscurity until auteurist critics discovered it.

⁵Granted, she's a killer, which Bart isn't, but as "mean broads" go, Laurie is really something of a softie: She stands by her man even after their initial decision to go their separate ways after the meat-packing plant robbery, and she could have ditched Bart at any time.

⁶Yes, this description of Bart works, even though I don't think John Dall and the screenwriters put together a wholly convincing character. Would any guy who had gone through reform school and the army really be so naïve as to fall so hard for a carnival dame, no matter if she looks like Peggy Cummins? The problem lies mainly in the simplistic psychology of Bart's gun craziness: He loves them but doesn't realize what they're really for other than shooting at bottles and tin cans. You'd think he'd be smart enough to realize that armed robbery is going to to lead to someone's getting hurt.

⁷Kael was never impressed with film technique as such, which is what so many of us find fascinating about Gun Crazy. It makes brilliant use of locations like the Armour meat-packing plant (actually in Los Angeles, not Albuquerque), and the long take, shot from the back seat of the car, in which Laurie distracts a cop while Bart commits a robbery, is breathtaking. It's also notable for the actual driving scenes -- most B-pictures would resort to process screens to show what's outside the car. There's nothing "crummy" about these sequences. I think the B-picture label occurs to Kael mainly because the producers, the King brothers, specialized in cheapies, and this is the only film by director Joseph H. Lewis that still gets much respect from anyone other than hardcore cinéastes. Still, it was tapped for the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 1998 on the strength of its later reputation.

⁸Don Beddoe? A familiar character actor but he just has an uncredited bit as "Man from Chicago" in the film. More interesting is the appearance of Russ Tamblyn as the young Bart Tare. Tamblyn is one of the few child stars who survived adolescence for a later career: He's best known for his athletic dancing in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Stanley Donen, 1954) and West Side Story (Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise, 1961) and later for playing Dr. Lawrence Jacoby in David Lynch's Twin Peaks TV series. The problem is that because we know the grownup Tamblyn, it's clear that the kid couldn't grow up to look like John Dall. But nobody knew that at the time, just as nobody knew that Mickey Rooney wouldn't grow up to look like Clark Gable when he played the younger version of Blackie Gallagher in Manhattan Melodrama (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934).

The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963)

Rosalie Crutchley in The Haunting

Eleanor Lance: Julie Harris
Theodora: Claire Bloom
Dr. John Markway: Richard Johnson
Luke Sanderson: Russ Tamblyn
Mrs. Sanderson: Fay Compton
Mrs. Dudley: Rosalie Crutchley
Grace Markway: Lois Maxwell

Director: Robert Wise
Screenplay: Nelson Gidding
Based on a novel by Shirley Jackson
Cinematography: Davis Boulton
Production design: Elliot Scott
Film editing: Ernest Walter
Music: Humphrey Searle

The scariest thing in The Haunting is Rosalie Crutchley's smile. Crutchley was an English actress who exploited her deadpan mien, playing sinister and forbidding characters in scores of films and TV series. (I remember her fondly as the melancholy Judith Starkadder in the 1968 BBC production of Cold Comfort Farm that ran on Masterpiece Theatre in the States in 1971.) In The Haunting she plays the dour housekeeper of Hill House who warns the group of unwanted guests that she doesn't stay in the house at night, and that she won't be able to hear them if they cry out for her. Then she bids them good night with a monitory rictus of a smile. Otherwise, I find The Haunting more a study in missed opportunities than anything else. Things that go bump in the night are scary (except around my house, where it's likely to be one of the cats), but things that go wham, wham, wham! in the night, as they do in The Haunting, are more annoying than frightening. The music cues by Humphrey Searle constantly telegraph an upcoming scare, and the Hill House interior crafted by production designer Elliot Scott and set decorator John Jarvis is so fussily overdone that that it's distracting: I kept wondering what that tchotchke or that dado was instead of feeling threatened or oppressed by it. Worst of all, Nelson Gidding's screenplay gives us no character with whom we feel a strong emotional connection, essential if we are to fear for their lives. Eleanor Lance is supposed to be the film's central consciousness -- she is the one who arrives at the house first and is presented as the most physically and emotionally vulnerable -- but her hysterical voiceovers become tiresome. I haven't read the Shirley Jackson novel on which the film is based, and it's possible that she brings her characters more to life than Giddings and Wise do, but the whole premise of putting these people in a haunted house -- i.e., to do parapsychological research -- is bogus, no matter how often it's copied. I find it peculiar that the movie is celebrated as one of the most frightening of all time by people like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, who have ably demonstrated their own superior ability to scare us.