A Discrepancy between the Screen and the Scenario : The Two Different Endings of Tennessee Williams' Baby Doll

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  • Discrepancy between the Screen and the Scenario The Two Different Endings of Tennessee Williams Baby Doll

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Abstract

The film Baby Doll (1956), directed by Elia Kazan, is based on Tennessee Williams' one-act plays, "27 Wagons Full of Cotton" (1953) and "The Unsatisfactory Supper" (1946). Through the process of the collaboration of Kazan and Williams, the film came to have an ending quite different from that of the published text. Though often dismissed as sentimental, the end of the published text accurately conveys the playwright's intention of presenting the heroine as a victim of the patriarchal system of the Deep South. Furthermore, Williams articulates the heroine's neurotic and victimized state in Tiger Tail (1979), the full-length play version of Baby Doll. Baby Doll never optimistically celebrates heterosexual love. Rather, Williams uses its heroine as a conventional sex symbol, but with sarcasm: her pubescent sexuality was originally derived from Flora Meagan in "27 Wagons Full of Cotton," in which she must endure rape by the vicious Vicarro (Silva Vacarro in Baby Doll). Vacarro (both in the film and the script) must scare Baby Doll to arouse her sexual feelings, and the awakening makes her subservient enough to sign a paper leading to her husband's arrest. I will attempt in this paper to examine Baby Doll basically as a victim by taking up the film's relation to the original one-act play, "27 Wagons Full of Cotton" and its subsequent stage version, Tiger Tail (1978). I will also show that the two different endings of Baby Doll at bottom share the same version of the heroine's victimized state, yet in its undisguised portrayal of the heroine's neurotic state, the ending of the published version is more faithful to the playwright's artistic vision.

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