Trivia / Baby Doll

• Banned in China: The movie was banned in many countries, such as Sweden, due to what was called "exaggerated sexual content".
• Method Acting: Eli Wallach enacted this on himself in the scene where Silva find his gin burned down. Wallach didn't care about cotton gins, and needed time to give Silva a legitimate reaction, so he made himself imagine that a friend had burned down his house with his family inside, and gave Silva the appropriate look of rage that was needed.
• The Red Stapler: After the movie came out, "Baby Doll dresses" were sold.
• Truth in Television: A considerable number of Italian immigrants migrated to the Mississippi Delta in the early 20th Century to work on cotton plantations, where they endured poverty and bigotry. By the mid-1950s, many of them had become successful farmers, but traces of prejudice against them still existed.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Marlon Brando would have played Archie Lee but turned it down.
  • Tennessee Williams wanted Marilyn Monroe for the part of Baby Doll, but Elia Kazan preferred Carroll Baker, whose work he was familiar with from the Actors' Studio.
• Working Title: Twenty-Seven Wagon Loads of Cotton and Mississippi Woman. In her autobiography, Carroll Baker reports that on her last day of shooting, Elia Kazan offered to change the film's title from Mississippi Woman to Baby Doll, her character's name, as a "present" to her.