Friday, April 19, 2018
475 - Baby Doll, United States, 1956. Dir. Elia Kazan.
Elia Kazan is one of the greatest directors of screen and stage that we have ever known.
He also made this film.
It is frustrating to come off watching the masterpiece that is A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and then see Baby Doll.
Elia Kazan + Tennessee Williams should = magic, right?
Unfortunately, in this case, no.
What happened?
On one level there is nothing wrong with it. It is a movie with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it has some drama to it. Perfect for a TV movie-of-the-week. But not a theatrical-release feature.
One could also argue that it is unfair to ask it to live up to the expectations cast upon it by the greatness of Streetcar.
But on another level it is a disappointment.
If you are a Southerner, then you will be frustrated. Here is yet another film made by northerners who do not understand the culture they are trying to portray. How many hundreds of those are there?
They filmed it in Benoit, Mississippi, and they promised not to make fun of the locals. OK. Thanks for that at least. If only they had made a better attempt to understand them.
And if you know Tennessee Williams, you will also be frustrated. This film does not come across as his work at all.
It is ostensibly based on two Tennessee Williams one-act plays--27 Wagons Full of Cotton and The Unsatisfactory Supper--but the plots have all been changed.
27 Wagons is a seething, sizzling play, and this film removes all the juice from it. It shows what should have been implied, and it leaves out the hottest scene. Then it switches the positions of the two males; it removes the bond between the husband and wife; it changes a rape to a consensual act; it makes the female complicit in the foreigner's crime; it turns her against her husband; and it makes her smarter, removing the very reason she is called "Baby Doll" in the first place, reducing the nickname to the fact that she sleeps in a crib.
Then the casting is poor.
Karl Malden as Archie Lee Meighan? What! If anything, if Kazan had to insist upon using his own stock actors, he should have cast Marlon Brando in the role. Archie Lee is supposed to be a physically pulsating man, visceral and instinct-driven, much more like Stanley Kowalski than Mitch Mitchell. What in the world is Karl Malden doing here? He is a fine actor, but this is not his casting by any stretch of the imagination. But even if Kazan had cast Brando, it still would have been off, because while Brando would have gotten the raw animal instinct right, he would not have captured his Southern essence nor his natural thinness.
Likewise, Carroll Baker misses the essence that a Southern actress would have supplied. Yes, she moved to Florida when she was 18, but she is from Pennsylvania and one can tell. Her acting is strong--no complaints there. She is giving herself to the role. But she does not possess that natural essence which only someone of a place can capture. Unless your name is Vivien Leigh. Not that I am suggesting Vivien Leigh for the role, but that she is one of the few actors in history who is not from the South but has somehow been able to get its essence inside her bones. This role would also require someone more visceral than the mannered roles she played.
Again, I am not criticizing the acting. Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, and Eli Wallach each delivers as good a performance as he can with the material he is given and the body he inhabits. We just need better material and different bodies.
So then you look at the credits and see that Tennessee Williams wrote the screenplay.
What?
Why did he butcher his own material so badly?
Until you dig a little more deeply and discover that Elia Kazan himself actually wrote most of the script and gave Williams the credit for it. For some reason, Tennessee Williams went MIA on this project. Literally. After filming started, he left town and abandoned the movie.
Then Kazan let the actors improvise frequently. There are entire scenes in the movie that are not even in Kazan's script, let alone in Williams' plays. Ugh.
I love the Group Theatre as much as anyone--at least the idea of it as it is reported to us. And I teach improvisation every week and use it in my own acting--when it is appropriate. But this is not the place for improvisation. When you are doing a Tennessee Williams play, then you should be doing a Tennessee Williams play. Exercise a little discipline here, please.
And as you keep digging, you also discover that Kazan did in fact offer the role of Archie Lee to Marlon Brando, but Marlon Brando turned it down. Too bad. It would have been so much better.
Oh, well.
This movie is not terrible. It is just not what I wish it were. Perhaps if you watch it without my expectations attached to it, then you will enjoy it better than I did. But if you do, do not read Tennessee Williams. Because this movie is not Tennessee Williams.
And as for the kerfuffle we are told attended it upon its release, well, we are sorry about that. The film is quite innocent by today's standards. And frankly, it is not steamy enough with respect to the way the play was written. I am not talking about skin. I am talking about the relationship between the husband and wife--which, frankly, was portrayed effectively with Stanley and Stella in Streetcar--so the irony, here, is that with this film people got upset about something about which the filmmakers had actually toned down.
So, then, here is the final equation:
Tennessee Williams + Elia Kazan - Tennessee Williams = something less than Kazan.
Maybe Williams took something of Kazan with him when he left town.
Meanwhile, I would like someone to make a movie adaptation of 27 Wagons Full of Cotton some day.
Because so far it has never yet been done.
* * * * *
Kazan directed his first film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, in 1945, based on the Betty Smith novel. He directed five more films, all technically excellent--and already with 15 nominations and 5 wins--and then hit his legendary streak in the 1950s, beginning with A Streetcar Named Desire.
By the time of Baby Doll, Elia Kazan movies had garnered 48 nominations and 19 wins. Baby Doll would receive 4 more nominations, and after that Kazan films would receive 2 more nominations and 1 win. In all, Kazan films received 54 Oscar nominations and 20 Oscar wins.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 1945 - drama, Betty Smith novel - 2 nominations, 1 win (Best Supporting Actor, James Dunn)
Boomerang!, 1947 - crime drama, Fulton Oursler Reader's Digest, article - 1 nomination
The Sea of Grass, 1947 - drama, Conrad Richter novel, Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn
Gentleman's Agreement, 1947 - drama, Laura Z. Hobson novel - 8 nominations, 3 wins
Pinky, 1949 - drama, Cid Ricketts Sumner novel - 3 nominations
Panic in the Streets, 1950 - crime drama/film noir, Edward & Edna Anhalt story - 1 nomination, 1 win
A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951 - drama, Tennessee Williams play - 12 nominations, 4 wins
Viva Zapata!, 1952 - biography, John Steinbeck book and screenplay - 5 nominations, 1 win
Man on a Tightrope, 1953 - thriller, Neil Paterson story -
On the Waterfront, 1954 - drama, Malcolm Johnson articles, Budd Schulberg story - 12 nominations, 8 wins
East of Eden, 1955 - drama, John Steinbeck novel - 4 nominations, 1 win
Baby Doll, 1956 - drama, Tennessee Williams play and screenplay - 4 nominations
A Face in the Crowd, 1957 - Budd Schulberg story
Wild River, 1960 - William Bradford Huie and Bordon Deal novels
Splendor in the Grass, 1961 - William Inge play and screenplay - 1 nomination, 1 win
The Arrangement, 1969 - Elia Kazan novel
The Visitors, 1972 - Chris Kazan screenplay
The Last Tycoon, 1976 - F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, Harold Pinter screenplay - 1 nomination
Look who was in this one together! Robert De Niro, Robert Mitchum, Jack Nicholson, Tony Curtis, Dana Andrews, Jeanne Moreau, Donald Pleasance, Ray Milland, Anjelica Huston. Amazing.
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