BABY DOLL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 934, 5 July 1957, Page 17

BABY DOLL

(Elia Kazan-Warner Bros) R: 16 years and over "DIRTY" and "sensational" are some of the names Baby Doll has been called, but for the life of me I can’t see what all ‘the fuss is about. This Baby Doll is the immature 19-year-old wife of Archie Lee, a decaying middle-aged cotton miller, though their marriage will not be consummated till she’s 20-the day after tomorrow. Business disaster and unsatisfied desire have brought Archie Lee to the end of his tether. When, in desperation, he sabotages the mill that has ruined him, its Sicilian owner, Vacafro, seeks his own rough justice and in getting it awakens the sensual woman in Baby Doll. Apart from a touching, half-crazy old aunt (Mildred Dunnock) who lives with Baby Doll and Archie in their rotting mansion, only these three characters really matter. Karl Malden’s Archie Lee is a part in little more than one key, very well done, though in this company less memorable than it otherwise might have seemed, for alone or together Baby Doll and Vacarro are the film’s teal triumph. We’ve all met Baby Doll before, and here an extraordinarily perceptive script by Tennessee Williams, playing by Carroll Baker that gets (as they say) inside the part, and fine direction by Elia Kazan have captured her for all time. Played with great subtlety by Eli Wallach, the cunning, ruthless Vacarro is no less memorable-his long scenes with Baby Doll in the yard of the mansion, now bullying, now tender, are among the best in the film: sensuous and finely detailed, as indeed the whole film is. Here (and elsewhere) it’s interesting to compare the finished film with the original script-now, by the way, available (N.Z. price 3/3) in Penguin Books. "I did the best I could to get on film what I felt about the South," Mr Kazan has said. "I wasn’t trying to be moral or immoral, only truthful." In the Mississippi delta lands he has captured unforgettably an atmosphere of decay that hac infected the veople. You might find

the film shocking, but it’s never gratuitously so-the action spfings from some of the most completely realised and convincing movie characters I have seen-and it’s not nearly as violent as Mr Kazan’s earlier films, A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. Five years ago when I reviewed the first of these I suggested that Stanley Kowalski’s behaviour was only an exaggeration of what seems normal to many people-that in the suburbs each morning his face looks out of many mirrors. You might like to try this mirror game again with Baby Doll,