Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 23-July-06
Spoiler Rating: High

Baby Doll (1956)

The title role in this not-quite-classic is a ripe blonde who looks like, acts like, and is consistently addressed as a "baby doll" but still learns about life the hard way. The brainchild of Tennessee Williams, whose screenplay Elia Kazan directs, this belle (Carroll Baker) resides in the Deep South in a crumbling mansion and a farce of a marriage. The film begins as she catches her husband of one year (Karl Malden) spying on her sleeping in her bed. This angers her because she is still a virgin and content to remain so. (Her bed is actually a crib, which sets up the first of the racy scenes that made this movie controversial.) Unfortunately, their nuptial agreement stipulates that Baby Doll will consummate the union on her 20th birthday, which is just two days away. Even pretty girls can't avoid the harsh lessons, and this movie presents them in spades.

They come to Baby Doll before she leaves her teens, but the bigger sob story belongs to her husband, Archie Lee. This guy is so cotton-pickin' emasculated he's almost painful to watch. Taunted by his young wife, mocked by every man in the county (including no-account blacks and Chinese), faced with financial ruin at the failure of his cotton gin, he's a Loser of biblical proportions for whom drinking and futile crime are the only available actions. I'm sure reams have been written on why Williams specialized in sorry creatures like this, but the movie suggests a grim answer: it's a man's world. I mean a Real Man, who would pull himself up by the bootstraps when the going got rough and master a chit of a girl no matter how squeamish she claimed to be. Unlike in many films about naifs and weaklings, Baby Doll and her old man don't gain in strength or dignity as the saga progresses. The point seems to be that they're ineffectual in the scheme of things.

Not so Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach), the Italian-American recently arrived in town to run the big corporate gin. He's a mistrusted outsider but his manhood's intact, as he proves when Archie Lee sets him on the path to revenge. He finds a prime opportunity in Baby Doll, the luscious child bride with a single day of innocence remaining. Watching him toy with the girl is the very definition of cat-and-mouse (their scenes have a comedic quality), and while the game is too easy, one can't help but admire his cool. This son of immigrants who demands success is the embodiment of Williams' theme. The likes of Archie Lee, effete and clinging to a diminished past, cannot be called men. The brass ring belongs to Silva's kind, who knows how to take it and a woman too. (And knows that dolls, like spoils, are meant to be enjoyed and cast aside.) Well acted but harshly written, "Baby Doll" offers a definition of how the world works that amounts to anything but child's play.

Copyright © 2006 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.