Baby Doll

The real villain in the controversy over the morality of Baby Doll is neither Tennessee Williams, who wrote it, nor Elia Kazan, who produced and directed it, nor New York's Cardinal Spellman, who mounted the pulpit of St. Patrick's Cathedral to condemn it. The villains are the advertising men who designed the singularly repulsive poster which decorates, among other things, a whole block of Times Square in Manhattan. While it is the usual practice for publicity men to emphasize sex in every film they promote, this time they have done us a real disservice, for their work is largely responsible for starting a controversy that only obscures the quality of the film. Baby Doll is neither as good nor as bad as various partisans have argued, and certainly not as dirty.

Williams claims that his script is a study of Southern degeneracy and of the influence of foreign blood on a corrupt system. In point of fact, it is a telescoping of two earlier short plays--Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton and The Long Stay Cut Short--and, for Williams at least, is a second-rate work. The story concerns itself with Baby Doll, a delicious but nearly brainless child of twenty, who is legally though not in fact the wife of Archie Lee Meighan, a middle-aged owner of a broken-down cotton gin. Goaded beyond endurance by his wife's refusal to consumate the marriage, Mieghan takes his revenge on the world by burning down the Syndicate-owned gin which has put him out of business. At that point, the competition, in the form of Silva Vacarro, the Sicilian manager of the Syndicate, moves in. Vacarro gets his revenge by seducing Baby Doll. While this story is not particularly attractive, it contains no pornography, either in the situation itself or in the way it is photographed. The playwright's declared purpose is to show corruption, and his story does so while remaining well within the bounds of what is acceptable on the modern screen or stage. The real trouble with the film lies in Williams' failure to make his people anything more than corrupt. They have more medical than dramatic interest--or at least they did until Elia Kazan got to work on them.

Kazan's most important contribution to the film, apart from getting remarkable performances from his actors, was to turn Williams' sweaty study of degeneracy into a comedy. Always searching for humor among the dirt, Kazan has his principals--Carroll Baker, as Baby Doll, Karl Malden, as Meighan, and Eli Wallach, as Vacarro--explore the comic sides of their characters. His direction is brilliant and the three performers, who give unanimously superb performances, prove once and for all that Kazan's rather nervous brand of naturalistic acting is quite suitable for comedy. The director's interpretation unquestionably improves the script, even though it makes something new out of Williams' tawdry story.