Rent Baby Doll (1956)

Lightbulb Moments - Baby Doll review by CH

A passing glance at Baby Doll (1956) might have one take it for Jack Nicholson’s first film. What with the hairstyle, the staring eyes forever on the point of leaving their sockets as the voice increases its pitch and behaviour turns maniacal, this turn as a Southern gin-cotton owner in a dilapidated mansion would become so familiar that one can only infer Nicholson learnt much from Kurt Malden here as Archie.

Middle-aged Archie has married the eponymous teenager with the promise to her late father that he cannot deflower her until she is twenty. Played by Carroll Baker (who was in fact twenty-five, and now ninety-three), she is a pent-up nymphet who sleeps in her childhood crib, such is the parlous situation which has led them to kit out the clapboarded mansion with furniture on tick.

For much of the time she sports the eponymous nightware which is the name by which she is always addressed (except by the senile aunt who tends a horrendous line in cooking). The nightgown was created in 1942 as a reaction to wartime fabric shortages but the expression gained wider usage with this film - and surely, such displays as a huge billboard on Broadway of her recumbent posture, were an inspiration for Kubrick’s film of Lolita.

This being the South, there are sinister rivalries at play. A torching destroys a rival cotton trader’s barn (spectacularly depicted with all the light and shade which makes this black-and-white more effective than colour would have been). Nothing can be proved, but that owner - known as the Wop - is determined, or so it seems, to have his revenge by making free of Baby Doll before her husband can do so. This was Eli Wallach’s first film, and he gives as brilliant a turn as the others.

The attempted seduction seethes, on both sides, one afternoon on a swing,. It belies the New York Times’s contemporary description of her character as “a piteously flimsy little twist of juvenile greed, inhibitions, physical yearnings, common crudities and conceits”. There is more going on than that, for this, one need hardly add, sprang from the mind of Tennessee Williams. Deriving from two 1946 one-act plays, his screenplay was the first ever published simultaneously with a film itself: to this Penguin cover was attached a wraparound of Carroll Baker in her accustomed position, and on the front itself an Observer endorsement by John Osborne: “Williams has hit off the American Girl-Woman of the last hundred years... Make no mistake about it - this Baby Doll kid is a killer.”

Elia Kazan knew what he was about, everything fits together under his direction so that, even at close on two hours, there is no slack, no moment in which to fear that all would slide into the self-parody which Williams’s outlandish notions always risked.

Every bare lightbulb sways, Rose - played by Mildred Dunnock - serves up so horrendous a vat of greens that it makes school food look the work of Elizabeth David. A de facto running commentary by the locals outside is a corker which can only be silenced by bullets. It’s that sort of place, this corner of Mississippi.

Among those considered for the title rôle was Marilyn Monroe. She did not hold a grudge but willingly acted as an usherette at its showing for a charity in New York. As for Jack Nicholson, he did get to play Carroll Baker’s husband - in 1983’s Ironweed.