Honestly, given her years in giallo, Carroll Baker would be an excellent choice for October, but if I learned anything from Louise Fletcher, it’s that you don’t sleep on the older performers just because you want to fit them into a great theme month. Baker is 92 and her first movie starred Esther Williams. This is not someone you want to put off; I’m writing this early and already hoping she lives until the article goes live. She’s been living in retirement since 2003, so it’s entirely possible some of our writers don’t have any pop culture memories from when she was working.
There’s a lot to be said about Baby Doll, which I’m pretty sure I saw in a college class. (About the US South. We watched a lot of ridiculous melodramas.) Eli Wallach as a Sicilian? Check! Karl Malden as a sexually repressed Southerner? Check! And Baker, in her first lead role, playing the young woman with the burgeoning passion she doesn’t understand in herself. It’s ludicrous in a way that only Tennessee Williams can be ludicrous, and it would bring Baker her only Oscar nomination. She lost to Ingrid Bergman for Anastasia, which has a whole lot going on behind it.
Was Baker good in the role? I mean, arguably it doesn’t matter. She was young—older than her character, but young—and beautiful and projected sex appeal. Still, she was good, regardless of whether she had to be. It’s been a very long time since I saw that movie, I’ll admit, but I seem to remember its being one of those movies where the leads were acting their hearts out for a movie that wasn’t really worth the effort. I do find it shocking, but not for the reasons the Catholic League of Decency did; how dare a girl get to not-quite-eighteen and married for two years and have as little sex ed as she did?
Funnily enough, though, the role I remember her in most is one where she’s playing The Good Girl. How the West Was Won is a movie not without its bits that have aged poorly; I love it, but it’s on my “the kids can watch it with me” shelf because there are bits I want to make clear to them about the movie’s politics. Still, it’s a fascinating movie, the saga of one family from the Erie Canal to the days of the railroads and the Coming Of The Law. It’s actually another movie featuring both Baker and Malden; this time, she plays his daughter. Debbie Reynolds gets more screentime as the wild and daring Lilith, but Baker is charming as the quiet and determined Eve.
It’s not the only time she was first-billed, and she was first-billed because, with a list like that, the only way to go is alphabetically. She had quite the career, from Westerns to biopics—she was Jean Harlow in Harlow—to her ten years working in Italy. And she kept on working; her last role was playing Rob Lowe’s mother on the show The Lyon’s Den. She did the typical Single Episode Of Murder, She Wrote, the lead-billed guest under Angela Lansbury. The quality of her movies is all over the place. Still, there are doubtless not a lot of people who worked with both Esther Williams and Meryl Streep. She’s had one heck of a career, and she’s still alive.
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