The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Interesting, but overwrought, look at 1940s society.Peyton Place is an effective snapshot of life in the early-1940s: the morals, mores and conventions of the time, and how some of these were made to be broken. Has some engaging characters and interesting commentary on old vs young, women's rights, morality.However, there are too many threads, too many characters with parallel stories, and these stories don't seem to know when to end. There are plenty of climatic moments in the movie, where usually a movie would have ended. Here, it is just a temporary peak in a long rambling story. Then we have some unnecessary drama - drama for drama sake. After a while it starts to feel like a soap opera.Ultimately, an interesting and engaging movie, but much more conciseness and focus were required.

As I read through many of the reviews here of this film I was pleased to see that it gets a pretty good rating, but disappointed at how short-sighted some are. For example -- that it's dated. Well, the film is well over 50 years old. Why wouldn't it be dated? Or that it's a soap opera or melodrama. Now, with that I really take exception, and the reason is that I grew up in a small town in the 1950s (the story takes place in the 1940s), and I could identify with most of the characters in the film. This is pretty close to how it was back then.The film is an exposé of the negative small-town attitudes so common in the USA of that era (and to some extent, still today). This particular story takes place in New England where all appears to be nearly storybook-like, while under the surface there is scandal, murder, suicide, and incest. Constance MacKenzie (played by Lana Turner) is a sexually repressed woman who raised an illegitimate child (Allison). Selena Cross (Hope Lange is being raised by an alcoholic stepfather, who rapes her, and a weak mother who hangs herself. Another character is the mama's boy Norman, played by Russ Tamblyn. Meanwhile, a new high school principal falls in love with Constance MacKenzie...and it's a rocky road. And, one of the most interesting characters is the slightly (and delightfully) crusty Dr. Matthew Swain, the town doctor, played by Lloyd Nolan. It all comes down to how to save Selena from life in prison after she murders her stepfather, who intends to rape her a second time.Lana Turner gets top billing here, although it's actually Hope Lange and Diane Varsi who really have the dominant roles. Nevertheless, Turner is very strong here, and this film helped boost a career that had sagged just a bit. Russ Tamblyn is excellent, and matures interestingly as the film progresses. This is one of Lloyd Nolan's most memorable performances; particularly noteworthy is his soliloquy in the courtroom. I feel that Arthur Kennedy -- never a favorite of mine -- deserves special recognition here. No actor really wants to play an alcoholic child-molesting practicer of incest! But he is excellent here. There are other interesting choices of actors here -- David Nelson, Leon Ames, and Lorne Greene -- not that their roles are particularly noteworthy.There are only two criticisms that I have. First, the little brother of Selena doesn't appear to age a bit over 4 or 5 years. Second, in a few scenes, particularly with Turner, she is filmed in front of a rear projection screen -- and it looks really cheesy.This movie is well worth watching...just remember that it is depicting life over 60 years ago.

Episodic, overlong soaper is a compendium of small town clichés and stereotypical characters tastefully done, but also stodgy and overly long. It's episodic nature was ideally suited to a TV series which this material became. The most shocking thing about Peyton Place is that it was nominated for 9 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, the same year Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory failed to receive a single nomination in any major category! Mark Robson who gave us enjoyable trash like Valley of the Dolls and Daddy's Gone A-Hunting takes a reverential tone towards the material, and despite the pretty postcard exteriors it plays like a TV series with the whole thing becoming a courtroom drama. There's hardly a genuine emotion anywhere in the film, nor is there any sense of real life going on. The film exists somewhere between Imitation of Life(1959) and The Last Picture Show(1971)without the deliberate heightening of the former and the realism of the latter. And despite an impressive 5 Oscar nominations for acting, the performances are just adequate, and Lee Phillips is the dullest leading man this side of Efram Zimbalist Jr.

When you consider the definition of soap opera-- "A drama characterized by stock characters and situations, sentimentality, and melodrama"—plenty of variously admirable movies come to mind, including Oscar winners from the very first, "Seventh Heaven," through more recent movies like "Terms of Endearment." "Peyton Place" is certainly a soap opera, but not an admirable film. The litany of flaws would take more than the 1,000 words IMDb allows, and would require every synonym for mundane. The characters are so uniformly mutton-headed that I inferred extensive inbreeding in Peyton Place. The cockeyed motivations of two particular characters-- actually, make that four-- serve as proof: First: Selena Cross is facing trial for murdering Lucas Cross, her sexually abusive stepfather. She begs Dr. Swain not to come to her defense by testifying that she had miscarried Cross's child years before. Her reason? She's in love with a soldier named Ted, and believes that his life would be ruined if her secret were revealed. She argues-- get this-- that she'd rather face life in prison than live without Ted. And Dr. Swain, as dim-witted a physician as I ever hope to encounter, doesn't suggest that Ted deserves to be given a chance to hear the truth and prove himself mature and compassionate (and if he isn't, does she want him?), let alone point out the screamingly obvious fact that life in prison would also be life without Ted.Second: Allison MacKenzie wants to be a novelist. She shows a few short stories to her high school principal. He likes them but with reservations, and he sensibly recommends that she go to college. But she doesn't want to go to college. She doesn't want to read stuff like Shakespeare. She wants to find out about writing for herself, at a typewriter. Her naive passion persuades him, so he takes her to the newspaper editor. Who hires her. And Allison goes on to write crap like "Peyton Place." The End.