A single mother with a secret past as a married man's mistress who is too afraid to fall in love again. A sexually overt working-class girl not getting accepted by her boyfriend's rich father. A girl raped by her stepfather unwilling to speak up in the trial of her self-defense killing of the rapist. These are the women's plight in Peyton Place, a movie about the people in a supposedly gossipy small town in New England around the 1940's.

With these juicy plot lines, one should expect a rich melodrama. Unfortunately, the first two-thirds of the movie is too calm to bring out the deceitful and hypocritical elements of the town to which the climactic speech in the murder trial near the end of the movie refers. The characters are too "reserved" even in scenes where they are supposed to be bursting out in anger or resisting violence in an aggressive way. The result is a tame but pleasantly quiet portrayal of a socially repressed town.

B-