The Trouble with Baby Doll

"I've planted a bomb to blow up Baby Doll," cried an anonymous telephone caller to Hartford, Conn, police one night last week. The police shepherded 1,500 moviegoers into the street, searched the theater for an hour and a half but found nothing more explosive than the film itself, Playwright Tennessee Williams' sullen drama of degeneracy in the South (TIME, Dec. 24).

Denounced from the pulpit by New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman as "revolting" and "morally repellent."* Baby Doll ran into its biggest snarl in Providence. The police snipped half a dozen scenes before they would permit it to be shown. Warner Bros., the film's distributor, threatened to sue the exhibitor if he showed the cut version, but he hung out his "For Adults Only" shingle and began running it anyway. Roman Catholic Bishop Russell J. McVinney of Providence urged his flock to abide by the Legion of Decency's ban against the picture even in its censored version, but the box office reported that it had all the business it could handle.

In Albany, where the church threatened to boycott future films at the theater scheduled to play Baby Doll, the management pleaded with Warner Bros, to be let out of its contract to play the movie. In Boston, a spokesman for Catholic Layman Joseph P. Kennedy, ex-U.S. Ambassador to Britain and father of Massachusetts' Senator John Kennedy, announced that he would keep the picture out of his chain of 23 theaters in Maine and New Hampshire. (In Washington a Joint Services Commission discreetly omitted the picture from the list approved for showing in theaters of the armed forces; G.I.s will have to go to public movie houses to see it.) But in 18 key cities from New York to Los Angeles, Baby Doll piled up grosses that Variety called HUGE, SOCK, WHOPPING and TERRIF.

* But not found that objectionable by Britain's Roman Catholic Film Institute, whose Ecclesiastical Director, the Rev. John A. Burke, could "see no reason why adult Catholics should not see" it. Father Burke thought the film "a brilliant piece of work on a decadent subject" but that it "obviously was not the sort of thing for thoughtless people."

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