A Film Canon

The most scatological product of the studio system, this southern grotesque anticipates John Waters in its proliferation of disgust, horror and garbage, elaborating the triangular relationship between struggling cotton planter Archie Lee (Karl Malden), big business nemesis Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach), and wife Baby Doll (Carroll Baker), who still sleeps in a crib, and has only agreed to sacrifice her virginity once she reaches her twentieth birthday. Most of the action takes place on the "unusually long fall afternoon" before this momentous date, deflecting Kazan and screenwriter Tennessee Williams' shared plasticity into the frenzy engendered by years of sexual frustration, whose various outlets (including the infernal blaze that sets the narrative events in motion, as well as the first - and most titillating - cinematic depiction of female orgasmic awakening) simply fuel it, thereby transforming the antebellum manor around which most of the action revolves into the same, omniscient, polymorphously perverse topology that framed Miss Julie. The result is a vision of the south as melodramatic wasteland, its traditional distinctions between inside and outside completely obliterated, as various ethnic minorities (especially African-Americans) participate in a great, cosmic joke at the white man's expense, furniture is spewed forth from haunted plantations, and bed, kitchen and porch are cast before swine.