Peggy Sue Got Married (Tri-Star Pictures, Rastar Productions, 1986)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 2) my husband Charles and I watched the 1986 film Peggy Sue Got Married on Turner Classic Movies. Charles had seen it listed on the TCM Web page and said he’d seen it when it first came out and it had been one of his all-time favorites. That made me want to watch it even though I’d never seen it before. The film was directed by Francis Ford Coppola from a script by Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner, though according to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz it was originally intended for Jonathan Demme (who would have been far more appropriate directorial casting) as director and Debra Winger as star. Later Demme left the project due to so-called “creative differences” (an all-purpose term that could mean just about anything) and Penny Marshall took it on, then she too left the project due to “creative differences.” When Marshall left the film, Debra Winger quit, too, and producers Ray Stark, Barrie M. Osborne and Paul R. Gurian reached out to Coppola, who was just coming off the colossal failure of the film The Cotton Club (which I remember as a flawed but generally quite good film, and I especially liked Bob Wilber’s expert re-creation of the Duke Ellington band sound), who in turn brought in Kathleen Turner as the new female star and insisted on casting his nephew, Nicolas Cage (whose birth last name is “Coppola”), as the male lead.

The film is basically a romantic fantasy in which Peggy Sue Kelcher Bodell (Kathleen Turner) is married to, but separated from, her husband Charlie Bodell (Nicolas Cage). The reason she’s separated and plans to divorce him is that Charlie, who runs a discount electronics store he inherited from his father and does obnoxious Cal Worthington-esque TV commercials presenting himself as “Crazy Charlie,” has just taken up with a young bimbo who works for him (whom we never see). By chance her 25th annual high-school reunion is coming up and Peggy Sue plans to go in an elaborate metallic dress similar to the one she wore to the prom way back when. At the reunion she’s stricken with a heart attack, and when she comes to she’s flashed back to 1960, when she’s just about to graduate from high school. We meet the three younger incarnations of the men in her life: Charlie, who’s a stuck-up doofus who drives a spectacular blue Chevrolet Impala and wants to be a rock ‘n’ roll singer; Richard Norvik (Barry Miller), a classic nerd who in the 1985 framing scenes has become an Internet high-tech gazillionaire; and Michael Fitzsimmons (Kevin J. O’Connor, who got an “Introducing” credit; his most recent credit is from 2020 and he should have done more than he has), a self-styled beatnik who takes on an English professor who’s teaching Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Naturally Michael takes on the Hemingway cult, calls him the most overrated writer of all time and cites Jack Kerouac as the model for what a writer should be.

The film is also quite well scored; I give Coppola a lot of points for using Buddy Holly’s original demo recording of the title song instead of one of the two ghastly overdubbed versions made after Holly’s death, and Charles pointed out that Marshall Crenshaw is in the film as the leader of the cover band that plays at the Buchanan High School dance. (Marshall Crenshaw has the interesting distinction of having played both Buddy Holly and John Lennon: Holly in Luis Valdez’s magnificent Ritchie Valens biopic La Bamba and Lennon in one of the touring companies of the Beatles tribute show Beatlemania.) I was looking for anachronisms in the music – songs that didn’t exist yet in 1960 – and I thought I’d found one in The Champs’ instrumental “Tequila,” but I was wrong: the song was actually recorded in 1958, not 1962 as I’d believed. Of course, writers Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner couldn’t resist throwing in some anachronism gags, though at least one of them relates to something that isn’t in the final cut. In the film, Rosalie Testa (Lucinda Jenney) shows up for the high-school reunion in a wheelchair, but with no explanation of who she is or how she got disabled. In the original script, she was a school gymnast who became disabled as a result of a horrible accident doing a routine, and Peggy Sue tried to warn her off that particular move.

There’s also a scene in which Peggy Sue tells her classmates not to eat red M&M’s because the red dye was found to cause cancer, so in 1976 red M&M’s were taken off the market – though in 1986, ironically enough the year this film was released, red M&M’s returned to the marketplace after the company discovered a different dye. And there are scenes in the original script in which Peggy Sue tries to talk up the whole idea of pantyhose and encourages people to invest in Xerox Corporation; the pantyhose schtick ended up in the movie (though much less prominently) but the Xerox bit didn’t. One anachronism gag that did turn up in the final cut is that, in order to help Charlie succeed as a rock star, Peggy Sue writes out the lyrics to a song she says will be a sure-fire hit: The Beatles’ “She Loves You,” though to give it a more American 1960 flavor Charlie insists on changing “Yeah, yeah, yeah” to “Ooh, ooh, ooh.” She also mentions wanting to go to England to discover The Beatles (though through most of 1960 The Beatles were actually in Hamburg, Germany). For the most part, however, the film avoids back-to-the-future gags and instead focuses on Peggy Sue’s love life and the rivalry between the three men for her affections. She’s torn big-time when Charlie announces that he wants them to take a three-year sabbatical from their relationship and see other people, and then if they still want to get together after the three years they’ll marry. (In the 1985 framing sequence we’ve already learned that Peggy Sue never had sex with anyone but Charlie, which means she’s facing the world of dating again with an unusually high degree of trepidation.)

Peggy Sue first goes after Richard Norvik and gets teased unmercifully about it from her girlfriends, who regard him as a terminal nerd. Then she dates Michael Fitzsimmons after first throwing herself at Charlie – who’s perplexed that a woman who’d turned down his sexual advances just a week before now wants it desperately. Charlie essentially says he thinks she was right the first time and they should save it until after they’re married (though in the framing sequence we learn that they didn’t and she got pregnant, thereby forcing her to marry Charlie ahead of schedule). She ends up with Michael on the rebound and the two have a quite lovely sexual interlude beside a lake at twilight, but then Michael announces that after they all graduate he’s moving to Utah, where he already has a girlfriend. He wants Peggy Sue to move there, too, because “polygamy is legal in Utah.” (Actually, it isn’t and hasn’t been since 1890, when the Mormon Church was forced to renounce it after the U.S. threatened to invade if they didn’t. But I think we’re meant to assume that Michael doesn’t know that.) Ultimately Peggy Sue recovers from her heart attack and comes to again in 1985, and Charlie is sufficiently concerned about her that he agrees to break up with the bimbo and reconcile with Peggy Sue. Peggy Sue Got Married was a “director-for-hire” project for Coppola, but it’s a quite charming movie even though I don’t think I liked it as well as Charles did. I was especially glad that Coppola allowed his cinematographer, Jordan Cronenweth, to use vivid, neon-bright colors in the film instead of shooting everything in the dingy past-is-brown tones of Coppola’s Godfather movies.