Mark Robson
Peyton Place

In the 1950s, in America, cinema had a strong connotation and propulsion especially in a specific genre: the melodrama.

And so timeless Hollywood masterpieces that remain to this day in the pantheon of the greatest films of all time went down in history.

The melodrama is that genre where drama blends and entwines in one or more love stories—heartbreaking, passionate, murky—there’s something for everyone.

It wasn't easy to navigate the genre, as cinema had to contend with the infamous Hays Code, named after its creator Will H. Hays the Production Code, a series of moral guidelines that for many decades governed and limited film production in the USA.

Code Rules

The Production Code listed three "General Principles": No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin.

However, courageously, many filmmakers "challenged" the code, unfortunately always within certain limits.

Anyway, one of the most important and “scandalous” films of the era, of the 1950s Hollywood melodrama, was undoubtedly Peyton Place (1957), based on the scandalous best-selling novel by Grace Metalious released just a year before.

Peyton Place is an imaginary New England town, the classic provincial town—clean and pretty, there's even the lake. In truth, rather anonymous, far removed from the splendors of the metropolis and the America that matters (the wealth).

Bigoted and bourgeois enough, with so much dust under the carpet that eventually someone will shake that carpet and we’ll see quite a show.

Set in 1941, in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack, Peyton Place is a choral, masterful film, 157 minutes long, it was defined as the mother of all soap operas.

Characterized by an imposing (and for me intrusive) soundtrack (the only critique I would make), Peyton Place is an exceptional film, choral (as I already said), where all the actors, from leads to supporting roles, the dialogues, the direction, and everything else, move with extraordinary precision and clarity, with a linear and coherent development throughout all the long 157 minutes, without a slip. That’s why the film never bores, there are no fillers, no gimmicks or witty lines, no winks.

In short, it’s the classic “big old movie,” a masterpiece, aged indeed, and I should hope so, filmed 67 years ago and set 83 years ago. What do you expect? Rather, be the ones to immerse yourself in the era to understand and appreciate.

It would be a futile exercise to tell you who’s who or who does what; read the plot online if you like, but why? To know a little something beforehand? It’s not worth it.

Know that there’s the beautiful and alluring Lana Turner, one of the greatest Hollywood divas of all time, and a young Hope Lange, great as well. And don’t think the others are any lesser, eh?

The film received a slew of nominations at both the Oscars and the Golden Globes but didn’t win a single one: it had challenged the Hays Code.