Miscellaneous Movie Musings

[Strangler Lewis]

Originally Posted by Eliza Hodgkins 1812

This weekend I watched Tennessee Williams' <i>Baby Doll</i> for the first time. I cannot remember the last time a movie had me so hot and bothered. That swing scene is going to be burned into my memory until the day I die as one of the most erotically charged moments captured on screen. Kazan captured a girl's sexual awakening in a way that manged to be simultaneously graphic and subtle.

Eli Wallach, you make me feel positively wanton.

Interesting story about the power of art, expectations of decorum, etc.:

When I was at Berkeley in the early '80s, one of the theatre grad students directed 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, the one-act play on which Baby Doll was based. Apparently thinking there wasn't enough conflict in the play, she cast a black woman as the wife. The actress was a nice girl from a family of Jehovah's Witnesses. Her father came to see the play with a number of female relatives. As the syndicate owner starts making his advances, the father starts talking to himself in the audience, "You better keep your hands off her," and things to that effect. Eventually, he stands up, "You, stop touching her, and YOU get off that stage." As the mostly student audience around him tried to explain that it was just a show and that he should sit down, he said, "No, no. I've seen that kind of thing all my life. I don't have to see it in pictures." He walked out of his seat and started for the stage, but the women he was with talked him into leaving. The actress apologized, and she finished the play.