Baby Doll

A central image in Elia Kazan’s film Baby Doll (1956) is the decaying plantation mansion that belongs to Archie Lee Meighan. He bought the mansion intending to restore it and therefore to please his adolescent wife, Baby Doll, whom he also bought after a fashion from her father. The mansion signifies power, wealth, affluence, respectability, none of which Archie seems to have in the nearby town. Its decay signifies the general atmosphere of decadence that pervades the film and that Kazan, using Tennessee Williams’ screenplay, presents as the environment of the American South. The mansion is an empty relic, literally empty for most of the film, with most of the furniture repossessed.

Archie is not a descendant of the planter family that once owned the mansion. He aspires to better than middle class respectability, to wealth, to his wife’s sexual appeal, to everything he cannot have. There is some hint in the film that Baby Doll’s family was once wealthy and respectable, and during the first half of the film she often plays the role of the put-upon and dispossessed Southern belle, condemned to a miserable existence by declining family fortunes and bad luck.

The basic premise of the film is that Archie married Baby Doll after acquiring her from her father. He promises not to sleep with her until she turns 20. He keeps trying and failing to earn enough money to buy furniture and to restore the plantation to a state that will suit Baby Doll. She is young and irresistible and he fetishizes her. He wants to possess her sexually—this is the goal of all his efforts. To possess her will put the final brick in the wall of power, wealth, and masculine authority that he attempts to build and that collapses throughout the film. The film is about the collapse of Archie’s ambitions and dreams. Everyone in town thinks he is a joke. He is a big man only in his own imagination. He is a man held victim by his own wife, a nineteen year old who constantly berates and insults him and whom he hides his drinking from (he does a lot of furtive drinking).

Archie is not the only person who fetishizes Baby Doll. Her father apparently did the same, as her name suggests—she is never called anything else in the film. The film fetishizes her too. Our first image of her is of her sleeping in a baby doll nightgown in an undersized baby bed. Archie has bored a tiny hole in the wall so that, from the room next door, he can peer through the wall and watch her sleep. It is an incredibly bizarre and fascinating image, and, along with one other scene, it largely helps explain the uproar that the film provoked in some quarters on its release.

Baby Doll was released during the same decade as Nabokov’s novel Lolita, another story of fetishization.

As a drama, Baby Doll is full of bizarre and interesting characters but it is also a turgid mess. The appearance of the Sicilian cotton gin owner Silva Vacarro inserts an alien element into the film. As a man he is attractive to Baby Doll, and he awakens her sexually, the film suggests, though they never have sex—he takes a nap in her baby bed while she sings to him—this is the closest they come to sex. In another scene he talks quietly to her, flirting with her, seducing her with his voice and his manner, and the scene is intensely sexual. One would never expect to see such a scene in a film of the mid-1950s.

Silva represents a syndicate—whether this is an allusion to organized crime is unclear—the word syndicate certainly does represent corporations and industry, which is moving in to push out the traditional ways of earning money that threaten the traditional South in the film.

As the ultimate object of masculine desire, Baby Doll is also the ultimate victim, the superb male possession. Even Vacarro, who offers her satisfaction and escape, is really only interested in using her to get revenge on Archie, who apparently burned down his cotton gin.

The film offers numerous clues to the decline of the world of the film. The decrepit mansion is one clue, of course. In one scene, a black man who lives on or near Archie's plantation asks him when they can begin to plant cotton again. Archie doesn’t want to grow cotton. He probably doesn’t know how. But he does own a cotton gin from which he earns (or once earned) money for ginning the cotton of farmers. When the foreign syndicate moves into the town and opens a gin that charges lower rates, Archie and others in the town are put out of business. Resentment against foreigners, outsiders, is the result. When Vacarro’s gin is burned, many people in the town express approval.

Vacarro is not only resented because he is an successful outsider but also because his identity as a Sicilian, an Italian, what Archie calls a “greasy faced wop,” makes him racially ambiguous.

Another way the film demonstrates the decline of the region is the behavior of the black men and women who live around Archie’s mansion. They are always present, sitting around, doing very little at all, occupying every conceivable racial and racist stereotype. They laugh at Archie because they understand the deal he has contracted with his juvenile wife. (Everyone laughs at Archie—they see him as a sort of sexual joke, the old man who will never be able to satisfy his young wife if he ever gets the chance to try). On the one hand the film’s portrayal of blacks seems racist and stereotypical. On the other hand they are a sort of mute chorus that understands and fully appreciates the folly of the man on whose land they live. Is there any nod of recognition to the incipient civil rights movement? An old black woman sings “We Shall Not Be Moved” in a scene where it appears to have absolutely no significance.

Karl Malden as Archie at first is reminiscent of the character Mitch he played in A Streetcar Named Desire, another Kazan directed film based on a Williams script. But as the film develops he changes. The film actually has Malden repeatedly bellow his wife’s name, “Baby Doll,” just as Marlon Brando so memorably bellowed for Stella in Streetcar. But while Stanley Kowalski is a brutal, self-centered man like Archie, he is also a genuine masculine force, while Archie is failing physically. The film is about male authority, male possessiveness, and the ultimate victim is Baby Doll herself.

This was the first film Carroll Baker ever made, and certainly the most memorable. Her performance is remarkable, and even though the acting by Malden and Eli Wallach (who plays Vacarro) is strong, she is the center of the film. Wallach as Vacarro is grating and disturbing—he comes across as vaguely ethnic when he first appears (the pencil moustache and the little round hat are a dead giveaway) I thought he was supposed to be a Mexican. Eventually he reveals that he is Sicilian. He is like an infernal imp, tormenting and taunting and enticing Baby Doll, confusing and playing with her, finally trapping her on a rotting rafter in the mansion attic and forcing her to sign an affidavit that her husband burned down his cotton gin. The scene in which he chases Baby Doll through the second floor of the house and up into the attic is manic and bizarre. It was like Satan tempting the virtuous young woman to sin, to sex.

As a setting the South (apparently Mississippi) is a world of decay, moral and economic decay and depression, social upheaval, racism and racial suspicion, and change. It is also a place where attempts to aspire to long lost aristocratic prestige and position are bound to fail.

Aunt Rose is Baby Doll’s maiden aunt. She was passed on to Archie as part of the deal which brought him the girl. He hates and despises her and at the end of the film he tries to kick her out of the house. At the end of the film, as Archie is carted off to a night in jail, and as Vacarro leaves with the dubious promise of returning for Baby Doll the next day, Rose calls Baby Doll into the house. Both are victims, and the question with which Baby Doll ends the film is one of ambiguity—will she be remembered, or will she be left behind like Aunt Rose?: “Well, let's go in now. We got nothing to do but wait for tomorrow and see if we're remembered or forgotten.”

Archie is carted off to jail just as Blanche at the end of Streetcar is taken off to the sanatorium. It’s the state hospital in Baby Doll. Rose goes there to eat the chocolate the attendants give her. Archie, given his alcoholism and the fact that everyone more or less thinks he is crazy (the sheriff makes clear that Archie has had to be arrested repeatedly), will ultimately probably end up there as well.

Hugh Ruppersburg
Athens, Georgia