Baby Doll

“She's nineteen. She makes her husband keep away -- she won't let the stranger go.”

In rural Mississippi, Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Malden) runs a cotton gin that is going under and lives in a decaying house with his teenage bride, Baby Doll (Carroll Baker). Her father arranged the marriage, and Archie has agreed to wait until her twentieth birthday, now close. Kazan adapts two Tennessee Williams one-acts, and Archie is out of money, out of patience, and watching a rival gin owner, Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach), circle his wife.