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    Home»Movies»Movies by Decade»Movies - 1950s
    Movies - 1950s Movies - B 2 Mins Read

    Baby Doll (1956)

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    One of the best of Tennessee Williams’s steamy southern dramas about mendacity under the magnolias, this rare, seldom-revived movie classic is a welcome treasure.

    Shot on location in Beloit, Mississippi, the great Elia Kazan directed, and this gem launched the career of luscious 25-year-old Carroll Baker as a backward thumb-sucking Lolita-like Mississippi child bride who drives men wild with frustrated lust.

    Karl Malden is magnificent as her mad husband, Archie Lee Meighan, a cotton farmer fallen on hard times. Archie’s been outmanoeuvred by slick gin syndicate head honcho Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach in his screen debut), a self-described “wop” who’s anything but a good ol’ boy, and his home – a tumbledown Gothic mansion known as the Tiger Tail (actually the J.C. Burrus House, built in 1848 and the only genuine antebellum mansion in Beloit) – is in a serious state of disrepair.

    babydoll_008  babydoll_010

    The black and white photography of Boris Kaufman brilliantly captures the steamy atmosphere of the Mississippi backwoods.

    When it was first released, this film was denounced by the Catholic church, condemned by the Legion of Decency, and the centre of a storm of censorship controversy.

    Now it’s regarded as a high-water mark in cinema. It’s sexy, but also howlingly funny.

    Archie
    Karl Malden
    Baby Doll
    Carroll Baker
    Silva Vacarro
    Eli Wallach
    Aunt Rose Comfort
    Mildred Dunnock
    Rock
    Lonny Chapman
    Town Marshall
    Eades Hogue
    Deputy
    Noah Williamson

    Director
    Elia Kazan

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