Reflections on ... The Hollywood Reporter's interview with Carroll Baker

/ Pictured: Carroll Baker in the sixties /

My quick thoughts on the fascinating but problematic Hollywood Reporter podcast interview on 6 July 2021 with the fabulous Carroll Baker, who I venerate as a trash cinema goddess. (I call her that with love! It’s a high compliment!).  The profile is meant to commemorate the 65th anniversary of Baker's film debut (actually, Baker's show biz roots stretch all the way back to the dying days of vaudeville!) ... but it goes in an unexpected direction towards the end! 

90-year-old Baker is impressively sharp-witted, extremely articulate and has a treasure trove of juicy anecdotes from fifties and sixties Hollywood. Some highlights: 

Baker was offered the Natalie Wood part in Rebel without a Cause (1955) - but turned it down because she disliked the script! 

There was talk of Baker playing Madge in Picnic (1955), but studio mogul Harry Cohn’s protegee Kim Novak got the role instead (Baker makes a rare bitchy dig at another actress here: “Kim Novak couldn’t act!”). 

On Giant (1956): Baker and James Dean were already friends from their Actors Studio classes in New York, but once they made Giant together, the social-climbing Dean swiftly dropped her to befriend the more famous Elizabeth Taylor. Baker admits that at the time, she disparaged the acting ability of Hollywood movie stars Taylor and Rock Hudson (whereas she and Dean had "serious" Method training). Looking back now, to her credit Baker admits she was a snob and appreciates how genuinely good their performances were. 

Later, when Baker inexplicably rejected the role of Maggie in the 1958 film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Taylor was ecstatic, telling her, “Carroll! You’ve given me a whole new career!” Which was true: Cat reinvented Taylor as a gutsy, risk-taking overtly sexual adult actress (and began Taylor's fruitful association with Tennessee Williams). 

Baker is eloquent and sympathetic regarding her peer Marilyn Monroe. She recalls how Monroe would drink straight vodka and pop Seconals while partying with the Ratpack, then at the end of the night the men would simply pour her into a cab and send her home, so she found Monroe’s death grimly inevitable. 

/ Pictured:  Baker as a young starlet around the time of Baby Doll / 

Obviously, Baker is asked about her most famous movie Baby Doll (1956), but I loved hearing her discuss the underrated avant-garde Something Wild (1961). Baker’s ultra kitsch sex kitten-era films The Carpetbaggers (1964), Sylvia (1965) and Harlow (1965) are routinely dismissed as dreck – but I happen to love them! Her post-Hollywood Italian filmography is entirely skimmed over.  

Then interviewer Scott Feinberg mentions Harvey Weinstein and inquires whether Baker ever encountered “the casting couch”. She volunteers, “My heart is broken for Bill Cosby … he’s a wonderful human being”, does some horrifying victim-blaming and asserts, “He’s a very sexy man!” Oh, Carroll! 

/ Baker (and her sequined nipples) around the time of The Carpetbaggers (1964) /

Listen for yourself here.

Further reading:

My reflections on Something Wild (1961).

My reflections on Harlow (1965).

My reflections on Andy Warhol's BAD (1977).

 

 

Reflections on ... Something Wild (1961)

This is what I wrote for Beige magazine in October: 

Upcoming British Film Institute season Birth of the Method [25 October – 30 November 2014] explores the intense, influential and revolutionary school of acting espoused by New York’s legendary Actors Studio in the 1950s. 

Sure, much of the then-radically naturalistic Method approach looks pretty twitchy and mannered today (the scratch-your-crotch and mumble clichés started for a reason), but the season features some genuinely interesting titles starring the Method’s most notable exemplars: Montgomery Clift, Marilyn Monroe and of course the Method made flesh, Marlon Brando (at the height of his virile beefcake beauty in On The Waterfront).
 
Particularly intriguing is the arty and obscure sexploitation vehicle Something Wild (1961). Starring pouty and perverse Carroll Baker (of Baby Doll notoriety, which is also screening) it’s virtually never revived so seize this rare opportunity to see this curiosity. Cinema’s kitsch king John Waters has raved about Something Wild as camp-meets-“failed art movie” hybrid and likens Baker in it to Ann-Margret in Kitten with a Whip as “When a Sexpot Emotes.” What more incentive do you need?

Obviously I made a point of seeing Something Wild (1961) at The British Film Institute on 27 November and it was indeed wild and a real experience! I’d never seen this rarely-revived and obscure psychological drama before but had always been curious about it.

I was expecting something a bit more sexploitation-y, kitsch and Kitten with a Whip. Having now seen Something Wild, I eat the words I wrote above! In fact it was relentlessly bleak, dark and very much an uncompromising somber European art film that just happened to be in English and filmed in New York. It stars luscious blonde Carroll Baker in what must surely be her career-best performance. The film both looks and sounds incredible. The dissonant jazz soundtrack is by Aaron Copeland. The film’s stark noir-ish black and white look is via cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan. Something Wild was apparently his last film. He’d begun his career working in German silent cinema under Fritz Lang in the 1920s and he invests that knowledge of German Expressionism to Something Wild, which frequently unfolds like a dream (or a nightmare). In 1960 Schüfftan had worked on the eerie French horror film Les yeux sans visage – he brings a similar sense of menace and dread to Something Wild.

Amazingly, the director Jack Garfein (now 85) was in attendance to introduce the film onstage. He said it took him fifty years to make sense of why he made Something Wild. As a child he was imprisoned in Auschwitz. The film was his cri de coeur and attempt to come to terms with those memories. Something Wild was a mega-flop when it came out, baffled critics and public alike (as Don L Stradley put it, “critics reacted to it as if they’d sat in something slimy”) and was swiftly buried by the studio. As a result, Garfein (who was married to Baker at the time – it was an intensely personal project for them both) was never entrusted to make another film again! I'm careful not to give too much away: the film concerns a girl who gets raped and psychologically unravels – very much anticipating Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). The ending is genuinely strange and divisive. It may be over fifty years old, but Something Wild hasn't lost its ability to disturb.

Further reading:  Read Kim Morgan's analysis of Something Wild here