Baby Doll ***** (1956, Carroll Baker, Karl Malden, Eli Wallach, Mildred Dunnock, Lonny Chapman, Rip Torn) – Classic Movie Review 1369

Co-producer/director Elia Kazan’s 1956 controversial movie version of the Tennessee Williams 1955 Broadway one-act play 27 Wagonloads of Cotton is clever, riveting and entertaining. Gaining notoriety in the title role that she was born for, Carroll Baker stars as Baby Doll Meighan, the sexy teenage bride of the dim, bigoted, middle-aged cotton-gin owner Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Malden), living desperate lives in rural Mississippi.

Archie, who has been married to the pretty, empty-headed 19-year-old virgin for two years, impatiently awaits Baby Doll’s impending 20th birthday so, by agreement with her dying father, the marriage can be consummated finally.

Eerily, Baby Doll still sleeps in a crib, wears short nightgowns and sucks her thumb, while the alcoholic Archie spies on her through a hole in the wall of their crumbling antebellum mansion, Fox Tail. Baby Doll’s senile Aunt Rose Comfort (Mildred Dunnock) lives with them.

Meighan is feuding with his incisive Sicilian rival cotton-gin owner, Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach), and sets fire to his property. Vacarro retaliates by attempting to seduce the virginal heroine by way of revenge and in the hope of getting an admission of her husband’s guilt.

Even from Tennessee Williams, this is extraordinary, over-heated material with outlandish characters at the end of their tether. It needs great performers to put this across, and gets it.

Apart from the bravura teasing, pouting and thumb-sucking of the gorgeous 25-year-old Baker (in a role initially assigned to Marilyn Monroe), there are superb performances from Malden, Wallach and Mildred Dunnock, who was Oscar-nominated as Best Supporting Actress along with Baker, who was in the running as Best Actress. Right from the start in movies, Wallach may not be very Italian, but he is very good.

Shot in Mississippi, featuring locals in the crowd scenes, Baby Doll is posh, but deliciously weird and accessible drama of the highest quality. As it was the mid-Fifties, it was inevitably attacked by the Roman Catholic National Legion of Decency, who said it was ‘grievously offensive to Christian and traditional standards of morality and decency’, and by other religious groups, who tried to have it banned and succeeded in some places.

But the furore over its supposed sexual explicitness looks strange, even incomprehensible, now, since the sex is extremely tame. It received a seal from the Motion Picture Code and it was the first time in years that the Legion condemned a major American film that had received Code approval.

Eli Wallach died on 24 June 2014, aged 98.

It marks the film débuts of Rip Torn (real name Elmore Torn Jr), who plays The Dentist (uncredited), and Eli Wallach, who took the BAFTA prize for Most Promising Newcomer to Film.

Eli Wallach died on 24 June 2014, aged 98. Wallach, who won a Tony Award in 1951 for playing Alvaro in Tennessee Williams’s original production of The Rose Tattoo, starred in The Magnificent Seven and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and carried on working well into his nineties.

Rip Torn (1931 – 2019).

RIP Rip Torn (1931 – 2019). He was nominated for a Best Actor in a Supporting Role Oscar for Cross Creek (1983)

There were four Oscar nominations (Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, cinematography, screenplay), but alas no wins. Kazan won the Golden Globe Award for Best Director and the film was nominated for four other Golden Globes. The film, which performed only okay at the box office despite all the controversy, originated the name and sparked the popularity of the baby-doll nightgown.

Still best remembered for Baby Doll, Baker gained a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1725 Vine Street in 1960. She formally retired from acting in 2002, after a 50-year career playing more than 80 roles in films, TV and theatre.

Also in the cast are Lonny Chapman, Eades Hogue, Noah Williamson and Madeleine Sherwood.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1369

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