Cinema: The New Pictures, Jan. 6, 1958

The Admirable Crichton (Columbia) seemed a fine piece of social satire to an age that was concerned with keeping the servants in their place. Much of the humor is inevitably lost on a generation that can't get servants in the first place. But somehow, despite the ravages of time and more than 50 years of amateur performances, this British adaptation of Sir James Barrie's play is well worth watching as a pretty lesson in the minor art of monocle farce.

"Haven't I always treated you as a human being?" splutters Lord Loam (Cecil Parker), the parlor pink. "Most certainly not!" gasps Butler Crichton (Kenneth More), the pantry tyrant. "Your treatment to me has always been as it should be." When Lord Loam insists, Crichton persists: "Any satisfaction I might derive from being equal [to my master] would be ruined by the footman being equal to me."

Having stated his social thesis, Playwright Barrie proceeds with his demonstration. He sets master and servant down on a desert island, and within two years a society without social distinctions has become one in which the class system is firmly established. But natural selection, not the accident of birth, has made the master the man, the man master. As Crichton wins his lord's daughter (Sally Ann Howes), it is plain, Playwright Barrie seems to be saying, that quality is the better part of equality.

Peyton Place (Jerry Wald-20th Century-Fox) cuts some of the sex and violence from Grace Metalious' hugely profitable peeping tome (300,000 hardbound, 3,000,000 paperback copies sold) about low jinks in old New Hampshire. The novel's small-town citizens were guilty of murder, suicide and such richly varied venery as nude swimming, bundling in convertibles, bastard-getting and incestuous rape. The film script tidies up a few of these sensations, softens a calculated abortion to an involuntary miscarriage, and lets a couple of villains become last-reel good guys. But there is still too much meaningless blood and lust in Peyton Place. The film collapses, during one of the least convincing murder trials ever filmed, when it tries to mop up the whole mess by blaming it on the town's callousness and nasty-minded curiosity. Peyton Place is not nasty at all; in glowing CinemaScope, it looks like the exurb where good commuters go when they die.

Nevertheless, the film is superbly convincing in its panoramas and crowd shots and in some fine scenes of young, nonviolent love. For the first time in memory, a New England town is filmed with neither the whales-and-ale quaintness of a picture postcard nor the brooding gloom of an H. P. Lovecraft horror story. Camden, Me. (chosen for the film setting because Gilmanton, N.H., where Novelist Metalious wrote the book, does not look the part) is prim, bleak or beautiful, but never stagy, and the townsfolk extras look and act like people. What is even rarer, so do most of the actors. Dialogue between a couple of beady-eyed spring peepers at a swimming hole: "Nekkid?" "Nekkid!" Arthur Kennedy, as a bestial Yankee shack dweller, is frightening, but a little too garrulous for a New Englander, even a drunken one. Newcomer Hope Lange is finely fraught as his stepdaughter. Lana Turner plays a mother who is a bundle of nerves about bundling.