A tomato dropped into a flower garden
The NYT uses one strange metaphor about Karl Malden.
His finest, strangest and most heartbreaking performance came in "Baby Doll," in which he plays Archie Lee Meighan, the dull-witted, sexually frustrated (to put it mildly) proprietor of a decaying cotton plantation who is driven around the bend by the caprices of his child bride (Carroll Baker) and the machinations of a wily business rival (Eli Wallach). The film, like "Streetcar" a collaboration between Kazan and Tennessee Williams, is a pungent hothouse, ripe with free-floating eroticism and Southern Gothic motifs. That Mr. Malden seems so manifestly out of place in this environment — baffled, earnest and sweaty, a can of tomatoes dropped into a flower garden — is exactly what makes him so perfect in the film, which depends on his anxious, uncomprehending discomfort.
