SnoopyStyle Older Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Malden) is married to 19 year old Baby Doll (Carroll Baker) living in the old mansion Tiger Tail, Mississippi under constant renovation. They have an agreement to consummate their marriage on her 20th birthday which is coming in a few days. He's in dire financial straits when outsider Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach) moves in with his own cotton gin and taking over all the business. He even loses the furniture. Then Silva's cotton gin burns down. Silva suspects Archie and tries to get back at him through Baby Doll.Carroll Baker does a fine job and probably better than Marilyn Monroe could do. She's younger anyways and has an explosive quality that isn't in Monroe. In fact, she is very impressive holding her own against Karl Malden. She needs to get in touch more with her childish side. Eli Wallach is quite a find as a newcomer. However it's an interesting notion if Monroe's sexuality could have pushed the controversy even more or maybe her known sexuality could have been a shield for the movie. With director Elia Kazan and writer Tennessee Williams, this movie has some fun moments.

st-shot Director Elia Kazan heads South with a quartet of New York theatre actors who leave their accents behind in the highly controversial film for its day, Baby Doll. While time may have watered it down somewhat, it still contains moments of powerful sexual tension that in this era of relaxed censorship elude most film directors.Archie Lee Meighan is a few days away from consummating his two year marriage to his thumb sucking teen bride Baby Doll. Baby finds Archie repulsive for good reason but married him anyway for security and so daddy could walk her down the aisle before he died. Archie had impressed the old man by claiming he would put her in the finest house in the county but a series of setbacks to his cotton business has them living in a dilapidated antebellum mansion with coon hounds running about the interior. In an act of revenge he burns down the cotton gin of the rival Silva Vaccaro who in turn seeks to even the score through the seduction of Baby Doll.Tennessee Williams screenplay is more play than film with most of it shot inside an outside the metaphorical mansion after the first half hour. Williams and Kazan's characters are a surly lot ( Mildred Dunnock's Aunt Rose is merely confused) but vile as Archie might be Karl Malden manages to evoke some sympathy for his plight. The scenes between Wallach as Silvio and Carrol Baker's Baby crackle with erotic intensity as Kazan crushes them together in frame after frame. The day long seduction, however, begins to wear after awhile and the interplay between Benoit County locals and the pros betrays the Methods immersion a little along the way making Baby Doll in spite of its incendiary story line minor Williams and Kazan.

bkoganbing Watching Baby Doll I have to ask just what the Almighty Legion Of Decency was so upset about back in 1956? There's no bad language and no sex scenes beyond what was per normal back in the day. I'm guessing that it was Tennessee Williams that brought about the scrutiny. He was breaking down a lot of taboos in those days and another writer with his name on the screenplay would not have received the attention. Of course they also didn't like The Moon Is Blue and this is far better.The source of Baby Doll is an expansion of a one act play Williams wrote for three part show All In One which had a short musical as well as short interpretive ballet. The play within the show was called 27 Bales Of Cotton and it starred Myron McCormick, Maureen Stapleton, and Felice Orlandi. All In One was not one of Tennessee's successes only running 47 performances during the 1955 season on Broadway.Those were the only three characters in the short play so Warner Brothers used some good sense in hiring Williams himself to expand his own work for the screen. Baby Doll has absolutely no trace of stage origins which you can't say for something like A Streetcar Named Desire, probably his best work or Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. The parts from Broadway were played in the film version by Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, and Eli Wallach in his screen debut.Malden is a local big shot in the fictional Tiger Tail County in Mississippi who has a cotton gin, but he's been losing business to brash newcomer Eli Wallach. That's around the time he's taken to himself a young trophy wife played by Carroll Baker, a sexy young vixen who is always referred to as Baby Doll. It was a marriage of convenience where Malden promised not to do the deed until until her 20th birthday which is coming up very shortly. It seems her father who was poor white trash wanted to know his daughter to be decently provided for. Malden's also taken over a rundown old mansion and is trying to fix it up. Carroll and a dotty old aunt played by Mildred Dunnock live there with Malden.Malden's been waiting a few years to get his itch scratched, Baker's not thrilled with the prospect of giving it up to Karl. But Wallach's cotton gin is forcing him to economic straights. That combination forces him to set a fire to Wallach's gin and ruin his competition. The authorities know full well Malden either did it himself or had the arson hired, but Wallach is the outsider and a Sicilian immigrant to boot. They politely look the other way. But Wallach has a plan all his own for revenge.One thing I have to say about Baby Doll, it's the only one of Tennessee Williams southern based works that I've seen where blacks are referred to. Here their position in white supremacist Mississippi is demonstrated fully. The mark of Malden's downfall is how the black employees laugh at him in the climax.Baby Doll was nominated for four Oscars in 1956, Best Adapted Screenplay for Tennessee Williams, Best black and white cinematography, Best Actress for Carroll Baker and Best Supporting Actress for Mildred Dunnock. As this was an adapted screenplay, Dunnock's role was not in the original work, but Williams infused the old lady with a certain amount of common sense if you carefully listen to her. Mildred lost to an actress playing a sexpot like Carroll Baker, the wild child Dorothy Malone for Written On The Wind.As for Baker she lost to Ingrid Bergman for Anastasia, but she got a role that she would forever be identified with. And being identified with a Tennessee Williams character is far from the worst thing to have. Though in her career she tried to downplay that even being cast as a saint in The Miracle.Baby Doll as it turned out was better on screen than in its original form on stage. It holds up very well, it is timeless as all of Tennessee Williams is. It's just not broadcast that often. But make sure to see it when it is.

aimless-46 "Baby Doll" (1956) was not just way ahead of its time. Somehow Elia Kazan managed to make and release what is arguably the most erotic film of all time to a Hollywood and a country more uptight and restrictive than at any point in cinema history.Even more remarkable is that this clichéd story, in the tried and true Southern Gothic genre, actually transcends its medium (film); visually fusing Tennessee Williams' literary themes and the lesions of southern history into an allegorical dramatization of Southern decadence and self-victimization.Southerners whine endlessly about their historical victimization but rarely exhibit the insight to put it all into perspective. Putting this self-indulgence and self-destruction into perspective was what Williams was all about and he deliciously condenses his recurring themes into this screenplay. Kazan was more collaborator than director; he understood what Williams felt and he knew how to make viewers feel the same things.The story is all about the invasion of personal space. In the south this meant foreigners (from the North and from Europe) coming into their land and out-competing them. The invaders were more lean and hungry than the natives. They were less self-indulgent and more willing to invest for the distant future. The natives were all about conspicuous consumption and short-term comfort.Even when forced to take a longer term perspective; Archie Lee (Karl Malden) has promised to restrain himself and defer the deflowering of Baby Doll (Carroll Baker) until her 20th birthday; the southerner impatiently fritters away the opportunity to spend his time productively. Then he finds that when the fruit finally ripens it is snatched away by a hungry opportunist.What to watch for in "Baby Doll" is the routine violation of personal space. In the claustrophobic mansion the characters have no personal privacy. It gets even worse with the invasion of Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach); the characters are routinely in each other's faces and the camera captures it all with increasingly tight shots. Baby Doll herself is not your standard movie nymphet coming onto an older man. Once Vacarro has taken her measure, he assaults her in almost every scene, aggressively moving into her personal space as he hungrily pursues his prize.And like the aggressive Northern invaders, Vacarro's single-minded focus and pursuit of a goal soon overwhelms Archie; despite the fact that Archie enjoys the home field advantage and does not play fair, symbolized by the local Marshall who makes it clear to Vacarro that the law will not be applied equally.One scene that I particularly liked was when Aunt Rose (Mildred Dunnock) gives it right back to Archie at the dinner table. She has been living precariously under his roof up to this point. When he attempts to snatch away her safety she summons the dignity to stand up to him; and the camera gets tight on her face as she claims a bit more of his space.Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.