Grace Metalious' Peyton Place
How Hollywood Sanitized the Controversial Novel
In 1956, Peyton Place by Grace Metalious became a best seller, staying on the New York Times list for 59 weeks. The plot centers on the lives of three women in a small, New England town, with a number of subplots concerning the rest of the townspeople.
Single mother, Constance MacKenzie, tries to raise her daughter, Allison, with dignity while repressing her own desires. Allison's best friend, Selena Cross, lives on the wrong side of town with her family in a tiny shack. Metalious lifts the veil on small-town living, revealing the hypocrisies that fester below the facade of civility. She tackles themes such as incest, abortion, sex and murder.
One year later, in 1957, a film of the same name was released by 20th Century Fox. Lana Turner starred as Constance MacKenzie, and Mark Robson directed the film adaptation. The movie was a box office hit, becoming the 2nd highest grossing film of 1958. Although the film adaptation of Peyton Place was watered down to fit into the standards of the day, it is still seen as a castigation of small-town America.
Like many film adaptations of novels, the basic framework of the book remained intact. Constance MacKenzie enforces a strict moral code on her daughter, Allison MacKenzie, who is an aspiring writer. Like other townspeople, Constance hides a secret from her daughter. She is afraid to tell her daughter that her birth is the result of an affair with a married man. This storyline remains the same, but other stories are altered to be less controversial.
The secondary story about Selena Cross changes slightly from the original written work. While she is abused by her stepfather, Lucas Cross, the screenwriters age her from 14 to 17 years old. Additionally, when Selena gets pregnant as a result of rape, the movie only implies that she got an abortion. In the movie, Dr. Swain says the medical records should read appendectomy. The word abortion is never uttered in the movie. Thus, innuendo replaces the directness of the book.
The film rewrites the relationship between Betty Anderson and Rodney Harrington. In the book and the movie, Betty is the girl with the bad reputation. The book describes a tryst between Betty and Rodney in which she gets pregnant, his father bribes her with money, and as was common in the 1950s, she is sent away. The movie, on the other hand, makes them an exclusive couple, and she's just misunderstood by the town. Rodney's father even accepts her by the end of movie. The teen pregnancy issue is swept under the rug.
In works that deal with complicated parent/child relationships, Norman Page has the oddest relationship with his mother. In the book, Norman is a lot creepier, even deriving pleasure in voyeuristically watching his next-door neighbors. In the movie, he is just a shy boy with an overbearing mother. The writers eliminated Norman's creepy factor.
Although the film cleaned up a lot of the novel's content, it still raises a lot of the controversial questions about small-town life. Like the book, it raises eyebrows by debunking the perfect image of 1950s life and exposing social issues. For the quality of its writing, it received a number of award nominations.
Sources:
Metalious, Grace. Peyton Place. 1st. Lebanon: Northeastern, 1956.
Peyton Place. Dir. Mark Robson. Perf. Lana Turner. Television. 20th Century Fox, 1957.
