Arriving Christmas week of 1956, the film enraged the powerful Catholic hierarchy in New York City, with Cardinal Spellman's head practically exploding 'Scanners'-style at the very thought of it. The film rating board of the Catholic Legion Of Decency awarded the movie its dreaded "C' (for Condemned, ten times worse than that flaming crimson "A" worn by Hester Prynne).
Not being Catholic, the BQ doesn't quite remember what penalties awaited any wayward soul who snuck into "Baby Doll" against the church's wishes.....we're not sure if it meant excommunication or a very long stretch in the confession booth......
The big "C", however, did scare the living crap out of at least one Jewish guy.....Jack Warner, whose studio released "Baby Doll". Not to mention a whole bunch of theater managers. The movie quickly lost most of its theater bookings and any chance of making a profit. "Baby Doll" was sentenced to wait in limbo......to wait for the passage of years and the crumbling of 1950's moral standards to allow the movie to see the light of day in our more....uh....enlightened times......
You know the outcome, of course. Yesteryear's most controversial, supposedly groundbreaking films, viewed today......unspool before our jaded eyes as sweetly innocent PG equivalent romps....
Not that anyone's ever going to categorize "Baby Doll" as a sweetly innocent romp. Written as an original screenplay by Tennessee Williams and directed by Elia Kazan, it's a perpetually boiling southern-fried dramedy of sexual repression, innuendo and sweaty melodrama. With its frenzied characters on the edge of either nervous breakdowns or vengeful violence, it makes Williams' 'Cat On A Hot Tin Roof' look like a Disney animated musical.....
In their crumbling Mississippi mansion, failed cotton gin owner Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Malden) is reduced to peephole spying on his oh so tempting, dim witted 19 year old bride Baby Doll (Carroll Baker).Baby Doll, in the film's signature image, takes seductive, thumb sucking naps stretched out on a half-constructed infant's crib.(No wonder steam came out of Cardinal Spellman's ears at the sight of the film's Times Square billboard)
Archie Lee and Baby Doll have been married several years but according to the deal struck by Archie and his late father-in-law, the marriage can't be consummated til midnight of Baby Doll's 20th birthday. As this deadline approaches, Archie's in nuclear heat, but his cotton gin business has gone cold, usurped by a big business cotton gin managed by ruthless Sicilian Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach). In an impulsive rage, Archie burns down Vaccaro's cotton gin, thinking he'll force Vaccaro to truck over all of his cotton to Archie's gin.
Wallach's Vacarro, barely containing his self-proclaimed thirst for vengeance on whoever burned down his cotton gin, arrives at Archie's with truckloads of cotton and a seductive eye on Baby Doll. And here's where we lurch into the nitty gritty of the film's controversy.....with the entire middle section virtually a one act play in itself, a lengthy double-entendre back and forth between Malden and Baker, a bravura display of the actors' skill and Williams' mock-depravity dialogue.
But it isn't sex Vacarro's after (at least not primarily), but a signed confession from Baby Doll fingering Archie as an arsonist. When Archie Lee returns for the film's incendiary third act, he's almost out of his fevered mind with jealousy, rage and sexual hysteria....and keep in mind, he wasn't wrapped too tight to begin with.,,,,,
If you think this sounds potentially funny, you're right. Kazan, filming in rural Benoit, Mississippi, surrounds his perspiration-drenched actors with actual town residents. He frequently cuts to the black men playing Archie Lee's mostly ignored employees.......and their reactions as they watch the actors go at it are pretty much the same as ours.....they shake their heads in disbelief and frequently laugh out loud.
As for the outrage the movie stirred up in 1956? No bad language, no nudity, no real sex of any kind, and a few gunshots fired. (Oh wait...we forgot....Archie hits a guy over the head with a kerosene can...) In other words, if you don't listen too carefully to the ornate musings in Tennessee Williams' pungent speeches for his characters.....the too-hot-for-1956 "Baby Doll", in 2017....appears as harmless as a Barbie Doll. But still.....what a movie, with the three principal actors mixing it up as only superb actors can do with a Tennessee Williams excursion into the most primal human impulses. As a bonus, the writer bestows Carroll Baker's Baby Doll with some final poignant lines to set her up a Blanche Dubois in the making.
BQ barbecues up 4 stars (****) for "Baby Doll".....over 60 years later, it can still raise your eyebrows and make your blood run a little faster.....but not for the any of the reasons Cardinal Spellman roared about.......
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