Baby Doll January 8, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1950s , trackback
Filmed in rural Mississippi on a small budget, Baby Doll
I suppose the story is a little scandalous, as there is a sexual element involved. Karl Malden plays Archie Lee, a cotton plantation owner who’s married to the much younger Baby Doll (played by Carroll Baker) but is unable to consummate the union until she turns twenty years old. That was part of the agreement Archie had made to Baby Doll’s father, a powerful and wealthy man who was near death at the time and wished to see his little girl marry while he was still alive. The film opens with Archie’s plantation struggling and Baby Doll’s twentieth birthday only a day away. Baby Doll has an obvious contempt for her husband and still refuses him all marital intimacies, which has turned Archie into a peeping tom in his own house (the nicest one in town, but also supposedly haunted). Eli Wallach is the Sicilian Vacarro (meaning plenty of ethnic slurs) who’s nearly run Archie out of the cotton business with his more successful and modern gin. When Vacarro’s gin just happens to burn down, Archie is more than willing to help out with the needed cotton supply. Oh, and Baby Doll likes to sleep in a crib while sucking her thumb.
That last bit is most certainly a big cause of concern for the thought police who condemned the film, yet, aside from the promotional poster, the only time we see this on screen is very early on and it’s much more strange (or possibly corny) than erotic. In fact, as Eli Wallach pointed out in the featurette included on the DVD, Vacarro spends more time in the crib than Baby Doll. I have to think that the controversy that’s surrounded the film for fifty years is due in no small part to that brief image and much more lasting poster shot. It almost makes the whole fuss seem sort of manufactured since it was the film’s own promotional materials, including that jumbo size Times Square billboard with live models serving as stand-ins for Baby Doll, that impacted its notorious reputation.
Aside from the scene where Vacarro and Baby Doll share a swing while Kazan keeps the camera focused above the waist (allegedly due to the cold temperatures at the time it was shot and to hide the space heater sitting on the ground), the whole thing seems quaint even by the standards established from other controversial films of the era. While some of the featurette interviewees mention how funny the film is, I can’t share their sentiment there either. Most of the possible humor seems to land with a thud. I realize we’re in the realm of Tennessee Williams and his Southern gothic melodrama, but the Baby Doll character is much more ridiculous than outrageous. Her aunt (Mildred Dunnock) is even more inexplicably bizarre, sort of like a grandmother (who steals chocolates from hospital patients) to many of the quirky independent film characterizations we’ve been inundated with over the past two decades.
While Dunnock and Baker both received Oscar nominations, the two superior performances by Eli Wallach and Karl Malden were ignored by the Academy. The efforts from the latter two are a big reason why the film ultimately succeeds in spite of itself. Taking place over only two days and nights, Baby Doll is extraordinarily engrossing and the dialogue written by Williams himself sparkles. Even as someone normally adverse to stagy films, I can appreciate Kazan’s accomplishment here and, possibly as a result of the film being based on two separate one-act plays, I didn’t find it as theatrical as many of the other Williams adaptations. It’s not the kind of film I typically enjoy, but I can recognize its worth, if nothing else than by it keeping my interest.
Nonetheless, I do have to point out that Carroll Baker’s performance was personally annoying. Her accent was terrible and that’s just not how Southern people speak. I didn’t like how the film portrayed the South overall either, with enough focus on decay and waste to make these characters look like glorified trailer trash as if that’s the only type of people who live in the region. I’m not with the consensus who laud Williams for his contributions to Southern literature. (He moved to Missouri at the age of seven, attended college at the University of Iowa, and somehow became the person to represent the Southern United States in dramatic literature?) As in his other works, Baby Doll is not representative of the South I have grown familiar with since birth. Sure that’s a subjective complaint, but it’s still valid in regards to the atmosphere established by Williams and Kazan.
Regardless of my sensitivity to the arguably exploitative use of the South in Baby Doll, I still enjoyed much of the film. Eli Wallach, in his film debut, is very good and the performances overall are mostly up to the standard set by Kazan’s other movies of the decade. The controversy that’s surrounded it seems a little needless and exaggerated, if for no other reason than the character in the middle is nearly twenty years old. That’s a far cry from the 12-year-old Lolita from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel or even the 14-year-old version seen in Stanley Kubrick’s film a mere six years after Kazan’s film was released. The popular notion of Baby Doll as a ”child bride” also seems a tad overblown and, again, derogatory to the South’s supposed reputation of girls marrying at a young age.
As I mentioned earlier, it seems more like Kazan, Williams and the studio set out to make a taboo film or at least stretch the boundaries of so-called decency. I doubt they anticipated a full-on ban or some of the other reactions but it’s nearly impossible to imagine that they weren’t intentionally courting controversy. The scene of Baby Doll in the crib could have been excised, with a different poster used, and I’d guess the film would not have suffered creatively while avoiding the bulk of the commercially-debilitating backlash. If that were the case, though, would people have really cared about Baby Doll when it was released, much less now? I seriously question whether the interest would have been as strong over the years and perhaps therein lies the most impressive thing Kazan and Williams accomplished with their film.
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