1956: Baby Doll

Baby Doll (Kazan, 1956) 7/10

"Excuse me, Mr. Vacarro, but I wouldn't dream of eatin' a nut that a man had cracked in his mouth." (Baby Doll)

Sitting on the floor of a rotting Southern mansion, Archie Lee Meighen (Karl Malden) once more grabs his tools and heads upstairs to a vacant room. Fending off a scrawny dog, Archie Lee peeps through a frayed array of torn drywall toward a small hole opened up to the room next door.

Through the cracks, Archie Lee manages to catch a glimpse of the opposing room's lodger: a blonde girl laying in a gaudy bronzed cradle sucking her thumb. Excited by what he sees, Archie once more tries to flesh out the hole. But to no avail. The girl has awoken and has chastised him for his voyeurism.

But Archie Lee is no "Peeping Tom." Rather, the decrepit house happens to be his own and the girl happens to be his nineteen year old wife known as Baby Doll (Carroll Baker). And thus begins the sleazy, suggestive world of Elia Kazan's ultra-controversial Baby Doll: one of the most notorious American films of the Fifties. Based on a screenplay by eminent American playwright Tennessee Williams, Baby Doll is a bizarre offbeat black comedy that encapsulates Williams' central themes of youth, sexuality, decaying Southern society and combustible figures into a story of revenge.

Set in the Deep South, Baby Doll centers on the sexual and marital friction between Arthur Lee and the film's title character. Although twice her age, the balding and high-strung Arthur Lee secured Baby Doll's hand-in-marriage through a series of unfilled promises to her dying father. While Arthur Lee promises Baby Doll the world, all he can offer her is a run-down mansion and an antiquated cotton-gin. Unable to pay the bills due to the success of a rival gin-owner, the house lies void of furniture, aside from Baby Doll's miniscule bed. The bed itself has seen no movement between the couple, as Arthur Lee promised not to consummate the marriage, until Baby Doll turned twenty.

Embarrassed by their overt poverty, Baby Doll plans to renege on her end of the bargain just days before her birthday. Despite lacking in intelligence and qualifications, Baby Doll yearns to get a job. But when Arthur witnesses Baby Doll try to acquire a secretarial position by flirting with a local dentist, the jealous Arthur looks for a desperate solution to his problems. His answer is to set fire to the gin of his rival, an ancestral Sicilian named Vacarro (Eli Wallach). Incensed by Arthur's late-night act of arson, Vacarro enacts his Old Testament view of "justice" to avenge his loss; by seducing Arthur's wife.

Released in 1956, Baby Doll sparked a firestorm of criticism from religious and political leaders for its suggestive imagery, double-edged wordplay and raw sensuality. Much of this censure arrived before the film reached theatres by way of the film's racy poster adapted from the film's now infamous still of Baby Doll laying in her bed. Severely boycotted and banned by theatre distributors upon its release, the film was famously derided by Time magazine as "possibly the dirtiest American motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited." The Catholic Legion of Decency declared viewing the film was a sin.

Much of the film's controversy certainly stems from the divergent psychological worlds that Arthur Lee and Baby Doll reside in. Arthur Lee simply wants sex; Baby Doll refuses partially because she is not "ready for marriage." Her childlike world is solidified through living in a rotting house strewn with discarded Coke bottles, a hobbyhorse and her infamous bed. Her ambivalence is reinforced through her lack of education after she stopped at the fourth grade.

When Vacarro tries to seduce her on a swing and in an abandoned car on the Meighen property, Baby Doll appears reluctant not only because Vacarro's movements appear strange and uncomfortable, but also because she enjoys to participate in children's games, rather than engage in adult activities. Yet, the sensuality of these scenes is underscored by a suggestiveness, rather than an explicitness. Boris Kaufmen's camera never reveals where Vacarro's hands go, nor does it show anything more than Baby Doll singing to Vacarro as he lays in her bed.

For much of Kazan's film, the narrative strongly interjects between carnality and comedy. The decaying Southern mansion Arthur has purchased typifies much of the film's darkly comedic stance toward the South and Southerners. Arthur dreams of rebuilding the house merge with an ethos of restoring Southern glory, which contrasts with the reality that the region's cotton industry is now operated by the "foreigner" Vacarro, whose high-tech gin represents the modernity yokels like Arthur appear to reject. This is all evident in Vacarro's repeated praise for his Sicilian roots in that ancient civilization. The clean, progressive approach Vacarro adopts in his business plans or method of seduction sharply differentiates from Arthur's messy emotional imbalances and a house filled with trash Arthur that is unwilling to pay to have removed.

Surprisingly a comedy thematically centered upon Southern decay and repressed desires, the controversy surrounding Baby Doll has often strayed viewers away from its actual premise and approach. Directed by Elia Kazan with a bawdy eye, Baby Doll manages to eroticize some of the most pathetic and squalid surroundings captured on celluloid. While its lusty content has been dimmed by the passages of time, Baby Doll is still an interesting, flavorful film, which only threatens to fall apart in its frantic darkly screwball final third. Nevertheless, its flaws are amended by superb performances from the film's stars Karl Malden, Carroll Baker and Eli Wallach.

* Baby Doll is released on DVD by Warner Home Video and is also available in their excellent Tennessee Williams Film Collection

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque