Baby Doll

Oh Elia. Elia, Elia, Elia.

This is Elia Kazan’s 1956 film Baby Doll written by Tennessee Williams (based on his short plays 27 Wagons Fulls of Cotton and The Long Stay Cut Short). The film stars* Carroll Baker as Baby Doll, a 19 year old girl married to the middle aged Archie Leigh Meighan, a cotton gin owner played by Karl Malden. In order to marry her, Archie Leigh promised Baby Doll’s now deceased father that she would remain a virgin until her 20th birthday (now two days away!). Baby Doll is utterly unexcited about the prospect of having to consummate her marriage with such a soggy excuse for a man and treats her husband with the utmost contempt. Crazed, sex starved, and broke, Archie Leigh sets fire to the gin of his main competitor in the cotton trade, Silva Vaccaro, a sicillian played by Eli Wallach. Vaccaro sets out for revenge and the delicious seduction of Baby Doll begins.

If you watch this movie late at night in the middle of summer, you will walk directly into a dream.
A hot, thick, wet, dream.
Your legs will become very heavy, you will throw off the sheets and open the window.
You will lean against the windowsill and look into the night. Look at the streetlight on the leaves on the oak tree. You will return to bed (your bare feet will be damp with sweat and they will stick to the wood floor).
You will lie on your back.
You will look at the ceiling.
You will be very, very, very horny.

Clearly a movie like this would have to be banned by the Catholic Legion of Decency.

I first saw this film several years ago in the midst of a very deep, long, and debilitating depression. It was the middle of winter. The wastelands. The wastelands is the time between New Years Day and the end of the spring rains.
(I call it the wastelands because there is nothing but cold, wetness and gray. Nothing to look forward to)
I watched Baby Doll in the early hours of the morning. Or so I assume. I did most of my movie watching between 2am -5am, but time lost all meaning then so it could have been in the middle of the afternoon. Who knows.
I watched it in bed. This was the only sanctuary you see. A little island of comfort. Flannel sheets, lovely blankets, lovely sedatives and a movie.
Now it could very well have very well been some anxiety induced disassociative episode, but I experienced Baby Doll in a way I have with only one other film, Tarkovksy’s The Mirror. Strange indeed. These movies are worlds and worlds apart, yet the sensation was similar (to a slightly lesser degree with Baby Doll). You see, I did not watch a film at all. I had a conversation with myself. I crawled into my body and watched memories I forgot I had but needed to remember. They were projected on the inside of my body. Probably in my stomach somewhere.

There was something else with Baby Doll however.

An added dimension.

It was lust.

Lust of the greatest intensity. The kind you feel as a child and you are not yet able to identify the energy. The kind that creeps up on you. Like a slow moving poison. Inching its way up your body. Starting at your toes (you must splay them to release the energy). Spreading a smooth warmth that finds its way to the back of your throat and sits there quietly pulsating. It takes you a little while to recognize the force that’s gotten a hold of your body. And you swallow. You never thought it could happen, but it did. You have been turned on by Eli Wallach.

There is a scene in Baby Doll. A scene that beats the most explicit of sex scenes. It is Vaccaro’s attempted seduction of Baby Doll. They are on a swing together. If you have ever, as a child, spent time earnestly watching scrambled porn with a hawk’s eye for any unscrambled bits, you will recognize the power of the motion of the swing. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

“Motion relaxes people… It’s like a cradle. A cradle relaxes a baby.”

It’s also like something else…

I declare.

I have never seen a woman dripping with more languid sensuality than Carroll Baker in this movie. Everything about her suggests that she has just been ravaged for hours and hours. She of course has not, and this makes her, and her charm bracelets and coke all the more tantalizing.
And then there is her hair.
Her baby’s hair. White, fine, flyaway. Straight and unset. Tied back with a single satin ribbon.
And her voice.
Her speech impediment combined with her accent. The way her voice cracks. A cherry of yearning a top a vulnerability sundae.

As for Karl Malden, it has never occurred to me in any other film, but in Baby Doll, his nose is very similar to a certain part of the male anatomy. Archie Leigh is led by his penis. How could he not be, it is on the front of his face. If Archie Leigh’s nose is his manhood, Vaccaro’s is his ever present riding crop. How perfect. Vaccaro is in control of his desires. Poor Archie is at the mercy of his.

…Moving on

I have never been particularly attracted to Eli Wallach, but in this movie, he arouses my flaming boiling passion like no other. Not even Alain Delon. His appeal lies firmly in his disinterest in Baby Doll’s tail. Or his great self control.
He can do without sex.
Revenge is of much more importance.
He is playing with Baby Doll. Without the lure of sex she has no power. Without sex she is just a little girl fingering a satin ribbon and enjoying the clink of her charm bracelet. Vaccaro is the one person who dominates Baby Doll in the way she wants to be dominated. He is relentless. He is a force that never stops (until you have signed the confession of your husband’s crime). His straight body, his eyes, his knowing smirk.
He can have it, but he doesn’t want it. He is above it, and this makes him furiously sexy.
I want (and so do you) more than anything, to belong to all clubs that will not have me as a member. Beginning with Eli Wallach in Baby Doll.

P.S.
I made a (bad) short film in college called Baby (stills from it above). I had not seen Baby Doll yet then, and after watching it I was struck by the similarities between it and my film. Suddenly, something a professor said to me took on new meaning:
“It reminds me very much of Tennessee Williams”
I had taken that rather as a compliment at the time, but after watching Baby Doll I was horrified. He had thought I was copying the film! And I can’t blame him, the similarites are eerie. I guess Williams and I just have some scandalous ideas about sexuality.

* Also Mildred Dunnock as a delightful ghostly bird of an Aunt Rose