Leave It to Baby Doll

BABY DOLL
(Elia Kazan, US, R, 1956, 114 mins.)

Today is the fifth day of November. Tomorrow is the sixth day of
November, and the day after that is November seventh. And you know
what day that is, don't you? November seventh is your 20th birthday.
-- Archie Lee Meighan to his Baby Doll

*****

If Elia Kazan had created a sitcom, it probably would've looked a lot like Baby
Doll. Well, "looked" might not be the best choice of words. Jean Vigo and Sidney Lumet favorite Boris Kaufman (L’Atalante, The Pawnbroker, On the Waterfront) did,
after all, score an Oscar nomination for his flavorful B&W cinematography (aided immeasurably by Dick Sylbert's high baroque-gone-to-seed art design). But the
richly comic premise could've fueled at least a season's worth of hilarity.

First, there are all those domestic comedies from the 1950s, like Ozzie and Harriet and The Honeymooners, in which married couples slept in separate beds. Then there are all those slick dramedies from the 1980s, like Moonlighting and Remington Steele.

In their early days, the latter crime-solving duos acted as if they were wed (un-
like Hart to Hart, where the central twosome really were married). They worked together, fought together, and spent all their free time together. But they didn't sleep together. Instead, they generated sexual tension via witty repartee. And once they actually kissed, the tension began to evaporate. At least Remington Steele wait-
ed until the finale to suggest that the Big Day had arrived—Irish castle included. Moonlighting, unfortunately, couldn't keep its pants on. And with that premature coupling went the will-they-or-won't-they suspense that made the show such a hit.

In Kazan's tragicomedy, Carroll Baker, another Academy Award nominee, and
Karl Malden's Archie also sleep in separate beds—separate rooms even. In fact,
the marriage hasn't been consummated. They got hitched when she was almost
19, and she promised he could have his way with her when she turned 20. Now Baby Doll is two days from that milestone, and Archie can barely contain himself. Within the first few minutes, he spies on her as she sleeps. In a crib—thumb in mouth.

Later, Archie enters her room while she's getting dressed. Baby Doll tries to
kick him out, but he won't budge, so she turns her closet into a dressing room. Then, while she's taking a bath, he attempts a soggy grope. The move is sug-
gested; Baby Doll is in the water, chest artfully concealed by a shower curtain.
Then she screams and Archie flees, but Kaufman's camera waits respectfully out-
side. Instead of "Archie," Tennessee Williams could've just dubbed his hubbie "Blue Boy." Rarely have the movies produced a man more desperate—to get with his own wife. Then again, Kazan did cast Malden as the pious priest in On the Waterfont.

Yikes!

Yet the future Streets of San Francisco gumshoe doesn't play Archie with
sadness and self-pity, but rather antic energy. He zips about his cavernous
Southern home. He runs up and down the rickety steps, yelling at Baby Doll's
dotty Aunt Rose (Mildred Dunnock, alternately hilarious and heartbreaking) to
do this, that, and the other thing. Baby Doll is just a big, dumb kid. Running a household is beyond her limited skill set, but Rose is hard-of-hearing and pos-
sibly senile (poor Dunnock; as if getting kicked down the stairs by a psychopath-
ic maniac and enduring marriage to a suicidal salesman weren't bad enough).

Worse yet, the old mansion (a former plantation) serves as a 24-hour stage
show for its African-American audience. Some, like "Boll Weevil," are servants.
With others, it's hard to tell as they're rarely seen doing anything—other than laughing at bigoted ol' Archie's ridiculous antics, that is. And these aren't bois-
terous guffaws, but straight-faced silent chuckles (deadpan derision at its finest).

Archie ends up doing most things himself, but he rarely gets what he wants
or needs. That doesn't bring him down either. It's par for the course. He's Ricky Ricardo by way of Wile E. Coyote. He'll never capture the object of his desire.
(Ricky, on the other hand, may have enjoyed some off-screen nooky with Lucy,
but it's not as if he ever really "got" his wife.) Then Baby Doll makes fun of him because he's losing his hair. Everything is beyond Archie's reach: wealth, affection, respect—a full head of hair. He can't even be pathetic in private. Rose knows he's got it bad, as does the "audience," and as it turns out, the whole damned town.

Archie, Baby Doll, and Aunt Rose Comfort could almost be prototypes for
the Beverly Hillbillies before they struck it rich and moved to the big city. Into
this live-action Li'l Abner atmosphere enters the smooth-talking Silva Vacarro
(Eli Wallach in his first film appearance). Silva is everything Archie is not. Ar-
chie blames the outsider for stealing his business, so he sets fire to Silva's gin.

For some reason, the townsfolk find the resulting blaze funny, too (os-
tensibly because he's also stolen their jobs). Yep, these "people of Ben-
oit, Mississippi," as the credits would have it, operate exactly like a studio
audience. Except, instead of chortling at things that are supposed to be fun-
ny, they aim their mirth at those which would normally be considered tragic.

"Some people of Benoit, Mississippi"

Chortling aside, Silva is the designated straight man. While Wallach is too char-
ismatic to suck the air from the scenario, he's closer to a fully-realized human
than a stylized cartoon, and Baby Doll's comedy shifts towards melodrama when he
hits the scene. Granted, with his pencil-thin moustache, black togs, flat-topped hat,
and riding crop (?!), he looks like a low-rent Zorro, but that seems designed to emphasize his "ethnic" otherness (and Archie has a problem with all non-whites).

The men are brought together when Silva borrows Archie's rickety machinery
to convert his cotton into gin. Silva suspects Archie set the fire, so his offer
has nothing to do with generosity. In fact, he's cooking up a plan. And it invol-
ves, as he seethes, "Biblical justice." While Archie processes Silva's cotton, the Texan-born Sicilian processes—er, charms—his virginal wife. It's mostly talk, of course, but Baby Doll is clearly...intrigued. Silva acts like he is, too, though that
may simply be part of his plan. In either case, Baby Doll becomes less of a car-
icature in his presence as she moves from flirtatiousness to fear to acquiescence.

When Archie realizes something's going on between his rival and his wife, he
also changes, in his case from an amusing loser to a potential killer. He grabs
a gun and starts wailing his wife’s name (yes, Malden almost outdoes Brando’s
iconic "Stellaaa!"). Along the way, the ultimate question gets raised. Did they—
Silva and Baby Doll—get it on in Archie's absence? I say no, but you'll have to de-
cide for yourself (and I don't consider that a spoiler, since Baby Doll's deflowering would never have been shown anyway). Nonetheless, the film was condemned by Time magazine, censored by the Legion of Decency, boycotted by thousands of Catholics, and cancelled by a reported 77% of the theaters scheduled to screen it.

Yes!

That's the old news. I'm more interested in the way the film plays today.
When I wrote that it resembled a sitcom, I hadn't yet watched the whole
thing. Once Archie turns arsonist, the tone changes. Since situation com-
edies these days top out at 22 minutes, I still feel that that hyped-up first
act plays as such, but then drama starts to dominate the proceedings.

With its sexual suggestiveness, Baby Doll never really would've made it as
a series in the 1950s—not when it barely got a chance to make it as a movie—
but when you think back to the small-screen, fornication-free sex comedies of
the 1960s, like I Dream of Genie, or even the 1990s, like Married With Children,
it's hard not to imagine that Baby Doll didn't help make them possible what with
all those scantily-clad women, ineffectual men, and ribald double entendres.

Then there's Baby Doll's crib. Though she's past the age of consent, her infantile predilections suggest that, like Nabokov's Lolita (as opposed to Kubrick's…or Adrian Lyne’s), she hasn't entered adolescence. And when Silva's riding crop is introduced, the kink factor goes through the roof, even if he never uses it as a whip (he does, however, flick Baby Doll a few times, claiming he's "swatting flies"—yeah, right).

But television writers have played around with the concept of strange sleeping quarters before. Note that Adrian Pasdar's offbeat attorney in the too-quickly-cancelled Profit slept in a cardboard box. But that was the '90s. There was nothing suggestive or controversial about that; it was just creepy in a post-Twin Peaks kind
of way. Well, it was overtly masochistic, but not in the sexual sense of the word.

Nowadays, some consider Baby Doll a classic, others a disappointment or even an embarrassment. To me, it's none of those things. Rather, it plays more like parody—self-parody (specifically of Kazan's previous Williams adaptation, A Streetcar Named Desire), Tennessee Williams in general (his first script combines two one-act plays), the Actors Studio (from which the core trio originated), and the Deep South (though the cast denies it). The irony is that it was made by all these insiders on location, rather than a bunch of outsiders on a studio backlot. The good news is that it's
just as entertaining now as it must have been in 1956. It's also much funnier (in-
tentionally or otherwise). Not as funny as 30 Rock, perhaps, but close enough.

And lest it seem as if I pulled that name out of a hat, the film also features the debut of sitcom supremo (and 30 Rock guest star) Rip Torn. An unrecognizably scrawny fellow in the '50s, Torn plays a freshly-minted dentist from whom Baby Doll attempts to finagle a receptionist gig. I'm not about to suggest that Baby Doll led directly to the actor’s small-screen triumphs—most notably The Larry Sanders Show—but it can't have hurt. For that achievement alone, TV viewers should be grateful.

*****

Of course, I knew who Tennessee Williams was. He was a bad man because the nuns
in Catholic Sunday School had told us we’d go to hell if we saw that movie he wrote,
Baby Doll—the one with the great ad campaign, with Carroll Baker in the crib sucking
her thumb, that made Cardinal Spellman have a nation-wide hissy fit. The same ad I
clipped out of The Baltimore Sun countless times and pasted in my secret scrapbook.
The movie I planned to show over and over in the fantasy dirty-movie theater in my mind that I was going to open later in life, causing a scandal in my parents’ neighborhood.
-- From John Waters' introduction to Williams' Memoirs

Baby Doll is available on DVD from Warner Home Video (extra features include
the trailer, a bit about the infamous billboard, and a featurette with Baker, Malden, and Wallach). It's also part of the six-film Tennessee Williams Collection. Images from the AFI, DVD Town, Film Freak Central, and The Honeymooners Resource Page.