Elia Kazan returned to Tennessee Williams with Baby Doll (1956), possibly his most controversial film. It sparked a major censorship debate, accompanied by racy ads and condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency. Even by Williams' standards it's ribald stuff, notable for Eli Wallach's striking film debut.Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Malden) runs a failing cotton business in Mississippi. His agonies are exacerbated by wife Baby Doll (Carroll Baker), who won't allow Archie to sleep with her until she turns 20. Then he meets Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach), a Sicilian immigrant whose cotton business put local millers out of business. Archie burns down Silva's cotton gin in desperation. Expecting little justice from local authorities, Silva manipulates Baby Doll to get revenge on Archie.
Baby Doll is a class production, with excellent actors and a great director firing on all cylinders. Kazan's direction is much more assured than A Streetcar Named Desire, utilizing long takes (the tracking zoom during the bath scene) and clever staging (Baby Doll and Silva's conversation before a pig sty). But the story and characters dominate; this adaptation of Williams' 27 Wagons Full of Cotton rivals Suddenly Last Summer as Williams' most perverse work.
Baby Doll's protagonists embody sexual indulgence and casual bigotry. Characters use slurs like wop and nigger in regular conversation. One pointed scene has a hick demand a black waitress sing for him; she retorts with "We Shall Not Be Moved." Silva's a double-whammy interloper, both a foreigner and carpetbagger despised by the insular locals. Not explicitly a message film, Baby Doll's certainly a scalding indictment of Southern seediness, anticipating clunkier "socially conscious" dramas of the '60s like The Chase.
Like most Williams stories, sexual politics take center stage. Archie is a boor who thinks he's entitled to Baby Doll. She's shockingly infantilized, introduced asleep sucking her thumb, downing cokes and unable to spell simple words. One suspects Kazan made her 19 years old to skirt an outright ban. She's easy pickings for Silva, the best character. From his dark dress to his Latin lover demeanor he seems an antagonist, yet his motives are reasonable: Archie ruined his business and he's getting nonviolent, albeit underhanded revenge. Then again, his pseudo-seduction of Baby Doll undercuts our sympathy.
Karl Malden is dependably desperate and anguished, even as he descends into predictable mad hamming. Carroll Baker pulls off both kittenish sexuality and scatterbrained innocence. Eli Wallach proves perfect as an opportunistic sleaze, unusually sexualized in black outfit and riding crop. Mildred Dunnock gets an odd role playing even more messed up than the protagonists. Rip Torn has an early walk-on part.
Southern gothic's hard to pull off; done poorly you get self-important, sleazy trash like The Chase and God's Little Acre. Those flicks scandalized contemporary viewers but they're mostly bad jokes today. In contrast, Baby Doll holds up because there's class filmmaking beneath the sultry surface.
