Baby Doll | 1956
Baby Doll location: the Baby Doll house: Burrus House, Benoit, Mississippi | Photograph: The Plantation Trail
‘The dirtiest American picture ever legally exhibited’ squealed Time magazine of this Tennessee Williams adaptation, which sparked something of a boom in shortie-nighties.
Director Elia Kazan likes to work on real locations, so the movie was filmed in the South, at the small town of Benoit, in Bolivar County, Mississippi, on Route 1, about twenty miles north of Greenville close to the Arkansas border.
The house, where Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Malden) waited in frustration for his teen bride Baby Doll (Carol Baker) to turn twenty, is the JK Burrus House in Rosedale, about ten miles from Benoit. After years of vacancy and neglect, it’s finally been renovated as a family home – so remember the usual adjunct not to disturb the residents.
