SATURDAY, 11 MARCH, 2000, PHILADELPHIA

<DISSERT> The only real difference between “Gone With the Wind/Scarlett” and “Peyton Place/Return to Peyton Place” is that the original GWTW was good. Good book, good film adaptation. “Sequels suck.” — Scream 2. I was recently loaned the 1957 classic “Peyton Place” and its torrid early 60’s sequel “Return to…” — neither of which I had previously seen. The first Peyton Place is a moderately acceptable adaptation about a mid 50’s sexually frustrated tiny New England town in the early 40’s. To its credit, its heavily ladeled morality theme is that “sex is okay” and “old people are uptight,” which in 1957 must have caused some boats to rock. It stars a wooden and curvaceous Lana Turner whose acting abilities, as Dorothy Parker observed of another actress, “ran the gamut — from A to B.” Also popping in for the rôle of the white-trash, in-bred girl who’s raped by step-daddy is Hope Lange whose flawless bone structure and peroxide bottle-blonditude create all sorts of mysterious intrigue in the film: specifically, why was she cast in this role? “Astounding newcomer” Diane Varsi plays wooden Lana’s porceline daughter Allison, around whom the plot unfolds. Allison is a “nice girl” and must have been taught, as such, that “nice girls” don’t express much. Verbally, physically, facially or through delivery. And, of course, “bad girls” are named “Betty”. I’m not really slamming “Peyton Place”. Okay, it was enjoyable watching these two-dimensional characters “come to life” and misunderstand and miscommunicate between themselves to some sort of soupy, hasty resolution. I have a particular fetish for the 50’s/60’s “town snoop” character — generally a bitter, ugly, high-nosed old bitty in a big, absurd hat. With a veil. Who sniffs at everyone disapprovingly. And gossips. And ruins people’s lives. That gets me so hot. Mrs. Cravitz, have your way with me! But what I’m really plugging here is “Return to Peyton Place”, filmed four years later in 1961 by the same producer, but with a different cast and director. The two must be watched dos-si-dos in order to truly appreciate the sequel, obviously for the plot points brought up in the original, but to compare the story, the acting, the direction, the everything. “Return to Peyton Place” is a brilliant camp classic, and as with the other best camp classics (John Waters excluded of course), nobody involved with its production realised it was camp they were making. Carol Lynley replaces Diane Varsi as the central Allison, still daughter to a still uptight Lana mother, now played by Eleanor Parker, and probably cast solely because she could wear the same fabulous little outfits Lana did in the original. Saves on costuming that way I guess. Budget stuff. You know. The greatest coup of the film is that the white-trash misunderstood Hope Lange character is taken over by a budding, bilious Tuesday Weld who has all of the charm, yet none of the charm of Mz. Lange. When Tuesday recounted the rape subplot of the original film to her new lover, and when she was so caught up in the story that she snapped and attempted to kill her new lover with a fire poker, hallucinating that he was her dead step-father amidst veneer convulsions and tears, I nearly clawed my face off crying and laughing and rooting her on. Never has such bad acting been more apparent except, it is arguable, Sharon Tate’s moving suicide scene from “Valley of the Dolls”. But the camp abounds beyond Tuesday Weld’s “performance”. In “Return to…”, the actors and the story can really let loose, shedding that second cumbersome dimension, becoming one-dimensional characatures of the original characters in a painfully simple-minded and convoluted plot, the which never failed to astound me as it dug deeper and deeper into cliché after cliché to illustrate points that were already done to death, even in 1961. Fleeting images and scenes will remain with me until I die: The Allison character prancing about her “luxurious” New York hotel room, mime-smoking a pencil glamourously. The “exotic” young Italian bride standing on the ski slope in her little Fellini cat-eye glasses, staring at the sky and pleading, “Please god, forgive me for what I’m about to do to my baby,” as she deliberately takes a crippling, miscarriage-inducing spill which really doesn’t look like it would have chipped an antique bone china plate. The evil, snooping mother in the closet listening to her son’s conversation with his bride. The camera inexplicably pans off her face, down to her kneecaps and remains there for several seconds. Later, snoopmother sits down on a hatbox in the closet and the frame makes sense again, but I have rarely seen such bad camera direction as this example. Cinched dresses. Everyone had ‘em. Tiny little waists, cinched with such class, and balooning out to a “grab on and ride, boys” ass. A reading of a passage from Allison’s “scandalously lurid book” around which the entire plot hovers, and having that passage be one of the simplest, most tepidly mediocre chunks of prose perhaps ever plunked onto paper; meanwhile, Allison is being toasted as the New Glimmering Author in New York for this first novel. The film doesn’t have much wit, but if it did, it should have bestowed a morsel upon the “clever young authoress”, don’t you think? If she were really to be plumed as such a sparkly-warkly discovery by the literati of New York, wouldn’t she do well to come up with a better comeback line to her mother’s face-slap than a monotone, “I hate you for that”? </DISSERT>