You couldn’t get further away from The Magnificent Seven (1960) than this buttoned-up –Peyton Place melodrama but director John Sturges, struggling to put together a more favored project, ended up here. It’s not that he didn’t have experience in this genre, having helmed Spencer Tracy legal drama The People Against O’Hara (1952) and June Allyson in The Girl in White (1952) but it was only when you turned to this field that you realized how much more freedom there was in a western.
There’s no shortage of pithy dialog courtesy of Charles Schnee (Butterfield 8, 1960). The marriage of Arthur Winner (Efrez Zimbalist Jr) and wife Clarissa (Barbara Bel Geddes) is more “merger” than romance. Opposing lawyers are “friendly enemies.” Arthur’s son Warren (George Hamilton) balks at a “smug career.”
There a couple of marvellous scenes and the characters are well-drawn, too well-drawn perhaps, audience constantly being reminded of personality defects, and it reeks of the formulaic, wealthy lives coming apart in Mansionworld. The biggest problem is there’s way too many characters that suffocate the life out of the picture. The heat the director clearly expected to generate is missing, hardly surprising in a world where duty dominates.
We’re pretty much nearly halfway through the picture before adultery crops up, bitter alcoholic wife Marjorie (Lana Turner) falling for Arthur, the business partner of her husband Julius (Jason Robards). Just around the same time Warren avails himself of a one-night stand with local “tramp” Veronica (Yvonne Craig) because he wouldn’t dare lay a hand on fiancee Helen (Susan Kohner), the town’s richest gal.
Simmering in the background is what today we might recognize as early onset dementia, which in those days was just treated as the frailties of old age, when Arthur discovers his boss Noah (Thomas Mitchell) has been stealing from a client. So, as you can imagine, the whole set-up is all set to explode as characters rebel against self-imposed restraint.
First to crack in the bigger sense is Helen who commits suicide when a spurned Veronica accuses Warren of rape. Then you can take your pick of various other outcomes. And that’s a shame because there’s interesting material here, mostly left unexplored because we’re wrapped up in a game of consequences.
Ace Harvard law student Warren falls out with his father over the case, just discussed but never played out, of a young mother who has killed her baby. The woman, with a mental age of eight, believed her newborn was dead and so buried it. Warren argues his father should offer a plea of insanity, which Arthur rejects as a legal dodge. The question of how the pregnancy occurred is never discussed, but you can guess it could as easily be incest or at the very least someone taking advantage of an incapacitated youngster.
There’s a great scene – the Majorie A and Marjorie B sequence – where Julius explains how on the one hand his wife runs a great house and is a terrific social adjunct and on the other hand is wild, impulsive, demanding and it’s the second one he fell in love with and, although currently rejected, refuses to give a divorce. And it’s Julius again who has the best character defining scene, when he acknowledges that pity is “a dirty word.”
Some surprisingly raw language is used when it comes to the question of rape. “The law assumes a common tramp like Veronica can still be raped” and the question of consent carries a contemporary sting.
Perhaps the biggest issue is the unspoken. It’s not love the main characters are after, it’s sex. Julius is lame after an auto accident and that appears to hinder his activities in the marital bed. Warren is too scared of Helen’s reaction to engage in the normal fumblings of youth.
The top-billed Lana Turner (who headlined the original Peyton Place, 1957) is kept at bay for too long as the other factors are brought into play and to be honest she is way out of the league of the likes of Efrem Zimbalist Jr (A Fever in the Blood, 1961). He would scarcely come up to scratch for a woman like her unless she was desperate. And perhaps she is. Turner steals every scene she’s in. The only character who shows screen spark is the vengeful Veronica who refers to herself in the third person – “nobody treats Veronica like a tramp but Veronica.”
George Hamilton (A Time for Killing, 1967) has some moments, but not enough. The same goes for Yvonne Craig (Batgirl in the Batman TV series 1966-1968). Jason Robards (A Big Hand for the Little Lady / Big Deal in Dodge City, 1966) takes an early stab at the simmering tense persona he would make his screen template. Charles Schnee was so annoyed with what happened to his original script, adapted from the James Gould Cozzens bestseller, that he insisted on using the pseudonym John Dennis.
A well turned-out potboiler.
The Magnificent 60s 