Overrated

From my favorite movies..

A different way of telling a story

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

I don't know exactly what "Baby Doll" is. It's got all the Southern Gothic trappings of Tennessee Williams' darkest work, but it's not especially dark in story or themes. Nothing about it seems significant enough to raise it to the level of serious drama. So is it a comedy? Maybe, or at least Tennessee Williams' version of one. I did laugh, but I'm not sure whether that was because I found things truly funny or whether it was a defense mechanism in the absence of knowing what else to do.A young married woman doesn't want to have sex with her husband because he's...well, kinda gross....but she's super turned on by her husband's more successful business rival, who spends the entire film chasing her around her dead father's giant, dilapidated mansion trying to get in her pants. And that's it. That's what "Baby Doll" is about. It seems to be mostly an exploration of middle age male failure and emasculation, but I'm not sure what it has to say about the topic. Karl Malden plays the kinda gross husband who can't make a success of anything -- his business, his marriage, his sex life. He's a failure in pretty much every way traditionally thought to define a man. Eli Wallach, on the other hand, is successful in all the ways Malden is not, including but not limited to the ability to turn on his wife. And Carroll Baker is the eponymous Baby Doll, a woman child who seems not to understand the allure she has over men, and seems to both kind of like it and kind of not.Baker received an Oscar nomination for her performance. Mildred Dunnock, who plays an addled aunt, was also nominated in the supporting actress category, but I have no idea why. She has 12 minutes or so of screen time (I timed it) and has very little to do other than look lost. A weak year for contenders, perhaps? The film also brought nominations to Williams for his adapted screenplay and to Boris Kaufman for the film's black and white cinematography.Grade: A-

I read the play and I liked it. That's why I was interested in seeing this version.I now learn that it's also based on another one-act play, "The Unsatisfactory Supper". I have not read this one; therefore I have no means to know if this screenplay is poorly developed because of it. I almost couldn't believe it was Williams himself who adapted it. I understand that those were terrible censored times and they have to restrain from the S&M that it's presented on the original work. But it is just so different. Starting with "Baby Doll" (stupid name, by the way), whose insufferable, unlikeable and manipulative. I know that women in Williams' world could be seen nowadays as misogynistic representations, but this one is among the worst. You can't help to suffer for poor Archie Lee, even though we could assume he took advantage of her family's decay to get her to marry him.I had to take 3 breaks to watch the whole thing. It is filled with clichés and not clever resources like the irrelevant character of aunt Rose. It is completely pointless and annoying.It is only until 1 hour and 16 minutes have passed that things get interesting and at least I choose to believe our heroin got what she deserved.

Director Elia Kazan heads South with a quartet of New York theatre actors who leave their accents behind in the highly controversial film for its day, Baby Doll. While time may have watered it down somewhat, it still contains moments of powerful sexual tension that in this era of relaxed censorship elude most film directors.Archie Lee Meighan is a few days away from consummating his two year marriage to his thumb sucking teen bride Baby Doll. Baby finds Archie repulsive for good reason but married him anyway for security and so daddy could walk her down the aisle before he died. Archie had impressed the old man by claiming he would put her in the finest house in the county but a series of setbacks to his cotton business has them living in a dilapidated antebellum mansion with coon hounds running about the interior. In an act of revenge he burns down the cotton gin of the rival Silva Vaccaro who in turn seeks to even the score through the seduction of Baby Doll.Tennessee Williams screenplay is more play than film with most of it shot inside an outside the metaphorical mansion after the first half hour. Williams and Kazan's characters are a surly lot ( Mildred Dunnock's Aunt Rose is merely confused) but vile as Archie might be Karl Malden manages to evoke some sympathy for his plight. The scenes between Wallach as Silvio and Carrol Baker's Baby crackle with erotic intensity as Kazan crushes them together in frame after frame. The day long seduction, however, begins to wear after awhile and the interplay between Benoit County locals and the pros betrays the Methods immersion a little along the way making Baby Doll in spite of its incendiary story line minor Williams and Kazan.

BABY DOLL is not a popular choice but in my opinion it is the best thing Tennessee Wiliams ever wrote. It's his loosest successful dramatization; his hair is down, yet it is the most symbolically lucid of his parables conveying the tragic predicament of the New South. If STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE's subtext was Stanley Kowalski raping the former genteel order in the form of Blance Dubois, here the sexual conceit is wittier and the question of where it is ultimately headed far more ambiguous. Film has a surprising resemblance to Bunuel's VIRIDIANA, but Williams' despairing anatomy lesson is less withholding than the proud Spanaird's; it's also funnier.Kazan's direction is typically loud and unsubtle (loudness for Kazan always equaled vitality), still, the approach in this rare instance is less pat than usual primarily because, though what Malden and Wallach do is pretty much expected, Carroll Baker's performance is a stunner - what "the Method" always preaches but seldom delivers: a fresh, consistently spontaneous response to the dramatic shifts in the story. Nice to see 'Gadge' not smothering everything with his oppressively obvious personality; instead, playing things out, actually curious where at least one of his characters might take him.Small-scale; far from perfect (in fact, large chunks of it play like the Carol Burnett-Vicki Lawrence "Mama's Family Show", but also purposefully shocking, outrageous and surprisingly good.Rating: 7.5Was this review helpful to you?