Baby Doll

Based by Tennessee Williams on two of his one-act plays, this is arguably one of Kazan's least ambitious and most successfully realised movies. Essentially a black comedy about a bizarre and cruel romantic triangle, it concerns the intrusion of Wallach's cunning Sicilian businessman into the ramshackle Deep South lives of boor Malden and his immature nymphet wife Baker. Inevitably, flirtation, seduction and jealousy are the result. Condemned by the Legion of Decency upon release, its erotic content now seems tame indeed; but the grotesquely caricatured performances and the evocation of the baking, dusty, indolent homestead make for witty and compelling viewing.