Baby Doll

While it is the usual practice for publicity men to emphasize sex in every film they promote, they did us a real disservice with Baby Doll, for their work was largely responsible for starting a controversy that only obscured 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 consummate the marriage, Meighan 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 get 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.