Cinema: New Picture, Dec. 24, 1956

Baby Doll (Newtown; Warner) is just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited. In condemning it, the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency declared: “It dwells almost without variation or relief upon carnal suggestiveness.”-The statement is true enough, but there is room for doubt that the carnality of the picture makes it unfit to be seen. The film was clearly intended—both by Playwright Tennessee Williams, who wrote the script, and by Elia Kazan, who directed it—to arouse disgust; not disgust with the film itself, but with the kind of people and the way of life it describes. To the extent that it succeeds, Baby Doll is an almost puritanically moral, work of art. And yet, as the script continues, long after it has made its moral point, to fondle a variety of sexual symbols and to finger the anatomical aspects of its subject, the moviegoer can hardly help wondering if the sociological study has not degenerated into the prurient peep.

In the early scenes, the camera roots like an indifferent hog through a heap of white trash in the Deep South. In a rotting mansion on the Mississippi flats, in an upstairs room filled with dolls and hobbyhorses and empty Coke bottles, a ripe-bodied young woman lies curled in a wrought-iron crib and sucks her thumb as she sleeps. This is Baby Doll Carson McCorkle ¶Carroll Baker), who “had a great deal of trouble with long division . . . and never got past the fourth grade.” In the next room a balding, slack-jowled, middle-aged man, still dressed in frowsty pajamas even though the day is half gone, stares lewdly through a peephole at the sleeping girl. This is Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Maiden), the owner of a beat-up old cotton gin. who has just been put out of business by the competition of an interstate syndicate.

Archie Lee and Baby Doll are married. But the marriage, at Baby Doll’s mincing insistence and with Archie’s slobbering acquiescence, has not been consummated because Baby Doll, who is 19. does not yet consider herself, as she daintily phrases it, “ready for marriage.” Frustrated in both business and pleasure, Archie goes berserk one night and burns down the syndicate gin. The rest of the picture describes, with a degree of Priapean detail that might well have embarrassed Boccaccio, how the syndicate’s manager (Eli Wallach) gets his revenge; he not only seduces Baby Doll, but persuades her to give him evidence that it was Archie who burned down the gin.

The seduction scene takes up the better (and decidedly the worse) part of the picture. The seducer starts working on his victim in the middle of a junk heap back of the house. (“We could play hide and seek,” he slyly suggests, and she replies. “Ah’m not athaletic.”) He really gets going in the swing, where the camera closes in on her face while his hands are plainly busy elsewhere (“Oooo,” she gasps, “Ah feel so weak”), pushes her toward the brink by the pigpen, and apparently ends up with her in the crib after she coyly suggests that he take a nap (“Yew c’d curl up and let the slats daown”). Later, when the heroine murmurs “I feel cool and rested, rested and cool for the first time in my life,” it may strike some moviegoers that the language of Tennessee Williams, no less than his subject matter, often seems to have been borrowed from one of the more carelessly written pornographic pulps.

Nevertheless, the picture does have some not inconsiderable merits. Several scenes are models of what might be called pica-risque comedy. And Director Kazan, even though he cannot seem to decide whether he is reciting a dark poem or just telling a dirty joke, has won skillful performances from his veterans. Maiden and Wallach, and from Newcomer Carroll Baker, of whom the public is certain to hear a great deal more in the next year or two. As Baby Doll, she is the Coke sister of Southern folklore, all the way down to the bottom of the bottle.

*In Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral this week, Francis Cardinal Spellman issued a rare condemnation from his pulpit, denouncing Baby Doll as “revolting,” “deplorable,” ‘”morally repellent” and “grievously offensive to Christian standards of decency.” Declared His Eminence: “In solicitude for the welfare of souls entrusted to my care and the welfare of my country, I exhort Catholic people to refrain from patronizing this film under pain of sin.”