Return to Peyton Place

Compared with the original and it's brilliant cast, this sequel is a bit of a mess. Too much of Miss Lynley goes to New York and falls for very bland Jeff Chandler. Who cares. Also, the lack of a kindly Dr. (Lloyd Nolan in the first) strips the town of it's heart.

But, on the positive side, Mary Astor is terrific as the ultimate soaper opera version of the evil, possessive, rich, self appointed queen-of-the town. Some great verbal sparing with her new daughter-in-law. And even in defeat, her final, dignified speech is frighteningly prophetic 35 years later. I watch a lot of movies, and this performance took my breath away. Wow!!!!! She is to Soap Operas villains what Alan Rickman is to Action villains.

The sequel to the fifties blockbuster ,it's much more modest in scope and in ambition and its ending is so predictable it does not equal the first episode.Constance McKenzie (Lana Turner is replaced by Eleanor Parker) is no longer the central character but one must say there is no more central character.There are about three plots which could be depicted as "the book Alison wrote" "Ted and his over possessive mom" and "Will Selena be an outcast for all her life?" .All these plots meet in the end as Alison's stepfather stands in great danger of being discharged ,cause he put his stepdaughter's more or less autobiographical "work" in his high school library.Lucianna Paluzzi ,who plays the unfortunate daughter-in-law ,is a future James Bond Girl ( one of the best villains ,Fiona Volpe, in "Thunderball")

"Peyton Place" fans might be interested but the others had better choose the 1957 original work .

Holy cow! Gotta wonder why every single member of the original "Peyton Place" declined to appear in the sequel...where is Hope Lange, Dianne Varsi, David Nelson, and especially Lana Turner? Word was they all got fat heads from the success of this film and producer Jerry Wald would not offer enough money to entice most of the cast back...especially Lana Turner..word was Turner was "available" for the sequel at a very high price and Wald said "no go"..... Anyhow what kind of time frame was the sequel? The original Peyton Place was set during world war II, Ted Carter was inducted remember? Return to Peyton Place it is suddenly 1961....what? Watch closely when Allison is running down the street at the beginning of the film and you will see a 1959 chevy impala parked......twenty years later!!! Looks like Allison didn't age too much! Movie seems to be divided into two parts: Allison McKenzie and her story of Peyton Place and the selling of her book and part two, hell hath no fury like a disenchanted mother played to the hilt by Mary Astor who tries to ruin the lives of anyone who gets in her way, especially Selena Cross (Tuesday Weld) and her daughter in law, played by Luciana Paluzzi (a few years before being a Bond girl). Talk about the mother from hell....if you saw "A Summer Place" remember the mother from hell in that one with Constance Ford? Mary Astor is her equal in this film. Seems like the entire town of Peyton Place in the sequel is fixated on keeping Astor out of their hair......Eleanor Parker is the new Constance McKenzie and does not have the acting power of Lana Turner as the original McKenzie mom. She tries hard to overact ala Turner in the original but it just does not work. Tuesday Weld as Selena handles her role a bit better but just does not connect as well as Dianne Varsi....a tidbit about Weld, she was also filming "Wild in the country" with Elvis at the same time Return to Peyton Place was being filmed...story had it that she just commuted from sound stage to sound stage on a daily basis to make both films at the same time. As soon as filming for the day was done on Wild in the Country she hurried over to the Peyton Place set. Anyhow this film isn't too bad...just gotta love the execution squad of Astor and the local townspeople who threaten to fire Mike Rossi for placing Allison's book in the school library. A love twist develops between Selena (Weld) and a Swedish ski instructor (Gunnar Helstrom) who prods Selena to tell her story about being raped. Allison (Carol Lynley) falls in love with a married book publisher (Jeff chandler) as the movie bounces back and forth between the goings on in the town and Allison's love tryst with Chandler in New York. Mary Astor, as the mother from hell and the Polly Harrington of the town pretty much steals the film. By the end you will detest the sight of her. Ending leaves a little bit to be desired....a town meeting that ends with Astor being more bitter and everyone else trying to explain their personal beliefs. Allison decides not to keep her romance with Chandler at the end of the film and return to peyton place (no pun intended!). Not bad for a sequel, but the original is much better.

On the big, wide CinemaScope screen of the Fox Village Theater in Westwood, in West Los Angeles, California, where I saw this one first-run, I settled in with some rather high expectations as the lovely theme song was beautifully sung by Rosemary Clooney, while stunning vistas of New England beauty followed one another over the opening credits.

Alas, my hopes were quickly dashed and, as other IMDb comments attest, this followup to the very successful "Peyton Place" was a severe disappointment in most respects. The handsome cast was strangely set adrift amidst some rather drab production values and only Mary Astor was given enough to do and was allowed to do it well as the town's tyrannical matriarch. Her final scene is an example of an actress still in full command of her powers convincing an unwilling cinema audience (though not her fellow townspeople on screen) that being a prude and a social snob is a desirable way to live one's life!

Jose Ferrer as a director was never much of a visual stylist so the VHS tape of this CinemaScope production, most probably not letterboxed, might satisfy the curious who want to see an example of studio product that was mired in a soon to be abandoned estimation of what audiences of that day really wanted to see.

I was pleasantly surprised that RETURN TO PEYTON PLACE wasn't as bad as I'd remembered it to be - it's a well-mounted film, again produced by Jerry Wald (who produced, among other classics, MILDRED PIERCE), but neither as glossy-slick nor as compelling as its predecessor. It suffers from the same fate most sequels do, no matter how well-done or well-intended: the magic that sparked the original is simply gone and cannot be recaptured.

RETURN, of course, is a thinly-veiled account of some of what happened to author Grace Metalious after PEYTON PLACE became the publishing phenomenon of the 1950s (no indeed, the townsfolk were not too fond of their "Pandora in Blue Jeans," as she was called, and, if memory serves, did indeed fire her schoolteacher husband). But it's kind of inconceivable that Metalious's novel would have been published at all if she'd been the snotty bitch portrayed by Carol Lynley - no publisher would have put up with such an attitude from an unknown, first-time novelist.

CLEOPATRA's budget was straining the coffers at Fox, so the cast is not as big as PEYTON PLACE, nor, with three exceptions, as notable. Three Hollywood veterans - Eleanor Parker, Mary Astor, and Jeff Chandler, show the young folks how it's done, and Astor, selfish and manipulative as were two other characters she played (Brigid O'Shaughnessy in THE MALTESE FALCON, and Sandra Kovack in THE GREAT LIE, for which she won an Oscar) simply walks off with the film. We don't like Roberta Carter, or the censorship she tries to impose, but we understand her resistance to change, to losing the values and things she holds dear (including her son). And, unfortunately, Astor/Carter's advisory to the people of Peyton Place that they will live to regret their willingness to encourage such changes in morals as Allison's book seems to exemplify, was a sad prediction of the painful price we would pay in the 1980s for the sexual freedom of the 1960s.