Friday | August 21, 2009 7:00 pm

Baby Doll

Screening on Film

Directed by Elia Kazan.
With Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, Eli Wallach.
US, 1956, 35mm, black & white, 114 min.
Print source: UCLA

Among Kazan’s most controversial films, this dynamic and intensely cinematic adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ provocative study of sexual desire inflamed a passionate outcry from the Production Code Administration and the Legion of Decency, who tried to derail the film by branding it with their lowest rating of “C,” for “condemned.” Centered around Carroll Baker’s still shocking performance as the thumb-sucking yet sexually precocious Baby Doll and principally shot in rural Mississippi, Kazan’s mid-career masterpiece offers one of the finest renditions of the psychosexual territory of Williams’ mysteriously deep, Deep South.