Tennessee 100: Baby Doll

Sunday

Mar272011

Sunday, March 27, 2011 at 4:00AM

Andreas from Pussy Goes Grrr here, with a last-minute postscript to Tennessee Williams Week.

Sweaty, conflicted sexuality? Check. A seedy, decaying southern setting? Check. Characters who alternate wildly between decadent hedonism and harrowing descents into madness? Yes, we're in pure Tennessee Williams country with Elia Kazan's Baby Doll, starring Carroll Baker as the titular 19-year-old minx. She's married to Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Malden), the hot-tempered owner of a local cotton gin, and together they live in a rural mansion called Tiger Tail that, like their respective families, has seen better days.

This creaky house, considered haunted by the locals, plays a role similar to that of the cramped tenement in Kazan's adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. It helps define the film visually with its labyrinthine corridors, piled high with the detritus of the past, and it's the perfect setting for the psychosexual slapstick antics of Baby Doll and her would-be seducer, Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach). Vacarro—a Sicilian interloper who's new to the area—suspects Archie Lee of burning down his cotton gin, and he's willing to resort to some hanky-panky in order to secure proof.

So begins an absurd, twisted battle of the wills, in which the line between economic and sexual success gets blurred to the point of invisibility. Read the full post.

Baby Doll is raw southern gothic, and it's not ashamed to get a little silly by having Silva and Baby Doll chase each other around Tiger Tail playing hide-and-seek (or kiss-and-tell). Or having Malden howl "FOOD! FOOD!" at the top of his lungs when Baby Doll's dinner table innuendo gets a little too pointed. Kazan and his actors clearly recognized and embraced the dark comedy at the soul of this sordid tale.

The film isn't exactly laugh-out-loud funny, but at least the humor makes its characters' many woes seem a little less bleak. Archie Lee's ordeals especially could've come across as unremittingly depressing, but Malden plays him with such variety and vivacity, turning on a dime from pathetic despondency to sarcasm and then, of course, to explosive rage. Like many of Williams' creations, he's a seething cauldron of emotion and desire who unfailingly acts against his own best interests.

Wallach, in his screen debut, brings to Silva the self-assurance that Archie Lee lacks, along with the sleazy charm he uses to court Baby Doll. But Baker steals the show as the sultry, enigmatic centerpiece, the mystery neither man can solve. Throughout the film, she taunts them both and dabbles in cuckoldry here and there, refusing to just be Archie Lee's property or Silva's bargaining chip.

At one point, Archie Lee accuses her of having a "Mona Lisa smile," and it's true: her attitudes, interests, and intelligence are open to interpretation. Depending on how the men look at her, she can be either a thumb-sucking ingenue or a calculating tease. By the end of the film, though, she demonstrates a Scarlett O'Hara-like resilience, retreating indoors with her elderly aunt and sighing, "We got nothin' to do but wait until tomorrow, and see if we're remembered... or forgotten."

Over half a century later, the verdict is in: she's been remembered. Weird, sexy, and grotesquely funny, Baby Doll is a worthy successor to Streetcar as a Kazan/Williams collaboration, and an excellent showcase for its stars' diverse talents—not to mention Boris Kaufman's haunting cinematography or Kenyon Hopkins' jazz score, either of which could merit a whole article of its own. With his rambling, over-the-top screenplay, Williams dug deep into the connection between money and sexual hunger, and created three unforgettable characters in the process.