Parishioners at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral expected momentous news when the cardinal of New York rose to speak at Mass. The last time Cardinal Francis Spellman spoke, seven years ago, it was to condemn the torture and jailing of a Hungarian cardinal by the Soviet Union.
This time, Spellman warned his flock that a great “evil in concept” was coming that was “certain to exert an immoral and corrupting influence upon those who see it.”
This is what he was talking about:
What kind of woman would let herself be named 'Baby Doll?'
There was a lot about the movie to panic the cardinal. It was directed by former communist Elia Kazan and written by Tennessee Williams, who had mined repressed sexuality among Southerners in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
Baby Doll ? yes, that is her name ? had promised her dying daddy that she wouldn’t do the naughty until she was 20, only a couple days away, and the waiting was driving her husband crazy. Besides, Baby Doll wasn’t in the mood for Malden, a pathetic owner of a failing business.
When rival ginner Eli Wallace, thinking Malden had torched his business, shows up, he see Baby Doll and decides to seduce her. Not surprisingly for a Tennessee Williams play, nothing good comes from it.
That’s why the sight of Baker, laying in her crib with her thumb in her mouth, looked to Spellman like the horsemen of the Apocalypse, and he rolled out the big guns to suppress “Baby Doll.” The Legion of Decency condemned it, as well as bishops in several cities. Several theater chains banned the movie.
Reviewers were divided over the movie’s erotic tawdriness. Newsweek called it “one of the most unhealthy and amoral pictures ever made,” and The New Republic called it “The Crass Menagerie.”
“Baby Doll” made money and earned four Oscar nominations, but it wasn’t the hit Kazan and Williams had hoped. The movie’s most lasting impact, in fact, was on lingerie, where Baker’s alluring chemise was renamed the “baby doll” nightie.
Related Posts :
Any reaction is better than no reaction, I guess, and some companies this past weekend paid vast amounts of money and expended much time ...
The creator of nonsense verses, the poet and painter Edward Lear, was born today in Highgate, England, in 1812. A decade later, Dante Ga ...
The epidemic of doll-on-doll crime is a fading memory, as real in America's collective memory as the crack epidemic and the O.J. Simpson ...
Over six novels, Natasha Cooper's Willow King has gone through more evolutions than the animals on the Galapogos Islands. Once a woman w ...
Today’s the birthday of Rose Cecil O’Neill, author, illustrator and creator of the Kewpie Doll, born in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., i ...
