Word: dolls
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Baby Doll (Newtown; Warner) is just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited. In condemning it, the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency declared: "It dwells almost without variation or relief upon carnal suggestiveness."-The statement is true enough, but there is room for doubt that the carnality of the picture makes it unfit to be seen. The film was clearly intended-both by Playwright Tennessee Williams, who wrote the script, and by Elia Kazan, who directed it-to arouse disgust; not disgust with the film itself, but with the kind of people...
...early scenes, the camera roots like an indifferent hog through a heap of white trash in the Deep South. In a rotting mansion on the Mississippi flats, in an upstairs room filled with dolls and hobbyhorses and empty Coke bottles, a ripe-bodied young woman lies curled in a wrought-iron crib and sucks her thumb as she sleeps. This is Baby Doll Carson McCorkle ¶Carroll Baker), who "had a great deal of trouble with long division . . . and never got past the fourth grade." In the next room a balding, slack-jowled, middle-aged man, still dressed in frowsty...
Archie Lee and Baby Doll are married. But the marriage, at Baby Doll's mincing insistence and with Archie's slobbering acquiescence, has not been consummated because Baby Doll, who is 19. does not yet consider herself, as she daintily phrases it, "ready for marriage." Frustrated in both business and pleasure, Archie goes berserk one night and burns down the syndicate gin. The rest of the picture describes, with a degree of Priapean detail that might well have embarrassed Boccaccio, how the syndicate's manager (Eli Wallach) gets his revenge; he not only seduces Baby Doll...
...decide whether he is reciting a dark poem or just telling a dirty joke, has won skillful performances from his veterans. Maiden and Wallach, and from Newcomer Carroll Baker, of whom the public is certain to hear a great deal more in the next year or two. As Baby Doll, she is the Coke sister of Southern folklore, all the way down to the bottom of the bottle...
...Manhattan's St. Patrick's Cathedral this week, Francis Cardinal Spellman issued a rare condemnation from his pulpit, denouncing Baby Doll as "revolting," "deplorable," '"morally repellent" and "grievously offensive to Christian standards of decency." Declared His Eminence: "In solicitude for the welfare of souls entrusted to my care and the welfare of my country, I exhort Catholic people to refrain from patronizing this film under pain...