A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Thursday, August 20, 2026

Baby Doll (Elia Kazan, 1956)

Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, and Eli Wallach in Baby Doll

Cast: Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, Eli Wallach, Mildred Dunnock, Lonny Chapman, Eades Hogue, Noah Williamson, Madeleine Sherwood, Rip Torn. Screenplay: Tennessee Williams, based on his play. Cinematography: Boris Kaufman. Art direction: Richard Sylbert. Film editing: Gene Milford. Music: Kenyon Hopkins. 

Elia Kazan's famous "dirty movie" Baby Doll raises no eyebrows today, except possibly in its opening scene, when Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Malden), in his pajamas, pokes a hole in the wall to spy on his wife, known as Baby Doll (Carroll Baker), as she lies in a crib sucking her thumb. Millions spied on her too, in a famous poster image that fueled the ire of New York's Cardinal Francis Spellman. The image is perhaps perverse, but so was the reaction to it. The film is less about sex than it is about greed and ambition. Archie Lee's ambition, to possess not only Baby Doll but also the cotton ginning business, has been thwarted: The marriage has not been consummated because of an arrangement that they wouldn't sleep together until she was ready, and she promised that she would be ready on her 20th birthday, which happens to be the next day. As for the business, Archie Lee has been thwarted by a rival, the ambitious Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach), who has managed to contract with the majority of the cotton growers in the Mississippi Delta county where they live. A desperate Archie Lee resorts to desperate measures, but he has met his match in the cunning Sicilian. The result is a raucous dark comedy, one of Kazan's best films, set mostly in the decaying plantation house Archie Lee acquired in his ambitious plans. The atmosphere of the film, created in large part by Boris Kaufman's Oscar-nominated black-and-white cinematography and Richard Sylbert's art direction, is superb, and the three lead actors never gave better performances. The screenplay is credited to Tennessee Williams, although Kazan claimed that he wrote the script and Williams polished the dialogue. 

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