Elia Kazan's Baby Doll is an unpleasant film about unpleasant people. In fact, it’s one of the most unpleasant films that I have seen in quite some time. It follows the tumultuous love triangle between the middle aged cotton gin-owner Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Malden), his bubble-headed 19 year old wife Baby Doll Meighan (Carroll Baker), and Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach), the owner of the town's most modern cotton-gin which he (correctly) suspects was burned down by Archie. This is a film soaked in sexual violence: Silva alternatively seduces and terrorizes Baby Doll and Archie is just one bottle of whiskey away from forcing himself upon her (she has made him swear not to touch her until her 20th birthday). There is so much shouting and screaming that by the end of the film I had a headache. And it's not just the film's story that stinks; Baby Doll has some of the most atrocious sound mixing that I have ever encountered in a mainstream Hollywood film. Random lines are frequently muffled, poorly recorded, or completely unintelligible. More than once I had to rewind the film and re-listen to a snatch of dialogue because I literally couldn't understand what they were saying. Even worse, sometimes the sound quality will vary multiple times within a single take. This gives the impression that a lot of the dialogue was dubbed in post. If that's the case, then they did an atrocious job.
4/10
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