01
The Beguiled
Why this pick
Its Civil War-era girls’ school has the same sultry Southern confinement, corrosive desire, and shifting power games as Baby Doll, with an equally unnerving blend of eroticism and menace.
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
MOVIE1956 1h 54m USA
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Movies like
Baby Doll
Drama
CINEHUNCH / THE NEXT FRAME
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
If you loved Baby Doll, try these.
01
02
A Streetcar Named Desire
Why this pick
Kazan similarly turns a crumbling Southern home into a pressure cooker, using raw performances, oppressive heat, and sexual conflict to make domestic space feel dangerous.
03
Reflections in a Golden Eye
Why this pick
A feverish Southern psychodrama of repression and voyeurism, it shares Baby Doll’s interest in desire as something humiliating, volatile, and exposed within a decaying social order.
04
Suddenly, Last Summer
Why this pick
Its lush, claustrophobic mansion setting and stylized Southern grotesquerie echo Baby Doll’s combination of family rot, sexual unease, and heightened theatrical intensity.
05
The Night of the Hunter
Why this pick
Though more expressionistic and fable-like, its rural Southern world carries a similarly ominous, off-kilter quality, where innocence and adult predation uneasily coexist.
Finding the atmosphere, tension and little details that made this one stay with you.
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01 / THE STORY
A little about the film.
In the Mississippi Delta, failing, bigoted, middle-aged cotton gin owner Archie Lee Meighan has been married to pretty, empty-headed 19-year-old virgin Baby Doll Meighan for two years. Archie Lee impatiently waits for Baby Doll's 20th birthday just a few days away when, by prior agreement with Baby Doll's dying father, the marriage can finally be consummated. In the meantime, Baby Doll still sleeps in a crib, wearing childishly short-nightgowns and sucking her thumb, while Archie, an alcoholic, spies on her through a hole in a wall of their decrepit antebellum mansion, Tiger Tail. Baby Doll's senile Aunt Rose Comfort lives in the house as well and is tormented by Archie Lee.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
The people who bring it to life.
Mildred Dunnock
Aunt Rose Comfort
Lonny Chapman
Rock
Carroll Baker
Baby Doll Meighan
Eli Wallach
Silva Vacarro
Karl Malden
Archie Lee Meighan