Collages and comments by Brainscan:
At the age of 25, Carroll Baker appeared in the James Dean movie, Giant, and starred as a 19-year-old bride in Baby Doll. That should tell us something. Ms. Baker had the look of a much younger woman well into her long career, the last half of which was spent in Italian movies. By 1968, when she starred in The Sweet Body of Deborah, she was 37 but looked a decade younger. She remained alluring even though her fleeting nudity in this film revealed a body unlike those of other, classic sex goddesses of that era.
Scoop’s notes:
Ms Baker first became famous in 1956 for her sexy Lolitaesque turn in a film called Baby Doll, which was written by the esteemed playwright Tennessee Williams and directed by Elia Kazan, who was a major force in film and theater in the early 50s, having co-founded the Actor’s Studio with Lee Strasberg, and having directed his famous pupil Marlon Brando to his two greatest performances in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. Warner Brothers also cast Ms Baker that same year in Giant, the last picture made by the legendary James Dean. In such esteemed company, Baker was on top of the world in 1956.
She might have become a monster star if she had been a better team player, but she feuded constantly with Warner. She refused to act in a series of movies based on trashy books by Erskine Caldwell, and this caused Warner to punish her by refusing to lend her out for “The Three Faces of Eve” for 20th Century Fox, or for “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “The Brothers Karamazov” for MGM. Later, when she refused to play a nymphomaniac in another sleazoid film called “Too Much, Too Soon,” Warner wouldn’t loan her out to work with Laurence Olivier, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in “The Devil’s Disciple.”
She reached the end of her Hollywood fame as one of the famous dueling Jean Harlows in 1965, when Hollywood released two biopics named “Harlow” within a couple of months. The dueling Harlows proved disastrous for both actresses, who were generally ridiculed for their failure to capture the sassy essence of the superstar that was Jean Harlow. The only good thing people said about Carroll Baker’s Harlow movie is that it wasn’t as cheap and cheesy as the Carol Lynley version. Unfortunately, that really only meant that it was a failure on a much grander scale.
Carroll Baker is beautiful, but I can grasp as to why this film ruined her career. She looks beautiful in the Edith Head gowns, but the script does her a disservice by turning Jean Harlow into a screeching shrew; Baker has to say every line through gritted teeth, as if it’s the most important thing in the history of the spoken language. If you’ve studied Harlow’s career, you’ll be disappointed, of course.
The failure of Harlow wasn’t Baker’s only career problem. At one point she sued Hollywood big-shot Joseph Levine, and was all but blacklisted thereafter. She escaped the blacklist and post-Harlow humiliation by fleeing to Europe, where she was rediscovered by director Marco Ferreri. She later became the go-to leading lady of another Italian director, Umberto Lenzi, who made slick exploitation films.
For a full decade, 1967-76, she lived in Italy while she starred in, and sometimes removed her clothing in, what seemed like an endless string of awful 1970s Eurocrap movies, most of which were sleazier than the films she had refused to do for Warner’s. So it goes. Not long ago I posted an article about her nudity in Orgasmo (1969), and I have frequently discussed her humiliating turn in the title role of Baba Yaga, a film never intended as a comedy which nonetheless provoked audible guffaws from the audiences unfortunate enough to have seen it.
The most interesting thing about Baba Yaga can be found in the DVD deleted scenes, in which Baker did full-frontal nudity at age 42, looking fit and trim, but nothing like an actress who might have been cast as Jean Harlow:
She did her final nude scene at age 45 in My Father’s Wife:
After that point, her body having passed the nudity expiration date for Italian gialli, she returned to Hollywood and Broadway as a character actress. For example, you may have seen her as Dorothy Stratten’s mom in Star-80. As far as I know she is still alive at age 91, but has not worked for about two decades.