A
[moderately edited] film review by Andrew Wickliffe for thestopbutton.com on 2
May 2006.
I’ve read
a review of Return to Peyton Place
positing the whole film as a disservice to Mary
Astor. It might have been Maltin. Right now, I’m reading Bruce Eder’s
review over at allmovie. Eder’s a smarty-pants (he does or did a lot of
scholarly audio commentaries) and I’d almost recommend it over my own post,
because I made a few of the same observations. Return to Peyton Place starts out bad, with Rosemary Clooney singing a silly song over location shots of the
town. The first Peyton Place had a
great score - if it was a little derivative of Aaron Copland’s Our Town score - and the first couple
seconds of music in Return to Peyton
Place seemed all right… then the singing started. Clooney was married to
director José Ferrer at the time and
one imagines there’s a connection to her involvement.
Worse, the
first scene is with Carol Lynley.
I’m a Peyton Place fan and I can
imagine how upset people seeing this film in the theater would have been.
Lynley is a poor substitute for Diane Varsi, who originated the role. Poor
substitute might be too polite. Lynley’s acting is a crime against celluloid.
But then Eleanor Parker and Tuesday Weld and Mary Astor show up - and
here’s where Eder and I agree - and Mary Astor’s first scene is really good.
Immediately after, she becomes Mrs. Bates, complete with haunted house [a
reference to Psycho], but the first
scene is good. Tuesday Weld manages to have a few good moments, but she’s busy
being in love with Swedish ski instructor Nils Larsen (played by Gunnar Hellstrom). Eleanor Parker - replacing
Lana Turner, who was the lead in the original Peyton Place - is around because she has to be, but there’s no
emphasis on her. It’s a bad sequel in that way - set after the events in Peyton Place, but without certain events
that happened in the first film.
The idea
of the film - besides Mary Astor combating her son’s new, pregnant Italian
bride Raffaella (played by Luciana
Paluzzi) – is that Lynley is writing a book a lot like Peyton Place. The
novel was notorious at its publication, but the idea of turning that notoriety
into filmic content in a sequel is not a bad one. It would allow for the film
to cover the existing situations in the narrative and create all sorts of
conflicts, but it’s so poorly handled that it just doesn’t work. Jeff Chandler - who’s a good actor - is
bad in Return to Peyton Place. He
doesn’t fit the role of Lynley’s book publisher. His scenes are all with Lynley
and they are awful together, with no chemistry whatsoever.
It’s hard
to imagine a good sequel to Peyton Place.
You would need the entire cast to return. You would need five or six stories,
good ones (instead of two and a half bad ones). You’d need a good writer, and
while Return to Peyton Place’s scenes
are competently paced - you’d need a good director. But still, even with all of
those components (and Return to Peyton
Place has none of those components), there still isn’t a good artistic
reason for a sequel. [Wickliffe’s rating: ZERO stars]
Blogger’s
comment: The fact that none of the original Peyton Place cast participated in
this sequel is a real clue to how bad it is. I admit that I only watched it for
two reasons: (1) I’m a fan of Eleanor Parker and (2) Carol Lynley, who was born
in 1942, the same year I was born, passed away in September 2019 at the age of
77, and I wanted to reacquaint myself with some of her earlier work.
Labels:
drama, Eleanor Parker, Sixties
