Peyton Place

Grace Metalious' once-notorious bestseller Peyton Place is given a lavish -- and necessarily toned-down -- film treatment in this deluxe 20th Century-Fox production. Set during WWII, the film concentrates on several denizens of the outwardly respectable New England community of Peyton Place. ...more

The controversial, massively popular Peyton Place is a melodramatic soap opera of Herculean proportions. The filmmakers attempt to cram every gossipy degradation possible into the 157-minute running length, and, though the end results are actually less explicit than Grace Metalious' source novel, the film still caused quite a stir at the time. Peyton Place exposed the post-war cynicism that lurked beneath the genteel facade of the 1950s; it tempted moviegoers with the expectation of propriety, ...more