Baby Doll (1956)

Eli Wallach: Silva Vacarro

Photos 

Quotes 

• Baby Doll : Excuse me, Mr. Vacarro, but I wouldn't dream of eatin' a nut which a man had cracked in his mouth.

  Silva Vacarro : You've got many refinements.

  Baby Doll : Thank you.

• Silva Vacarro : I find you different this evening in some way.

  Baby Doll : Never mind that.

  Silva Vacarro : Grown up suddenly.

  Baby Doll : I feel cool and rested for the first time in my life. That's the way I feel. Rested and cool.

• Baby Doll : [after being told to make him comfortable]  Ain't nobody comfortable in that house. Lucky if you can find a chair to sit down on. You want coffee?

  Silva Vacarro : No, just a nice cool drink of water.

  Baby Doll : Oh, well the house water runs warm. But if you've got the energy to run that old pump over there you can get yourself a nice cool drink from that there cistern.

  Silva Vacarro : I've got energy to burn.

• Baby Doll : I feel so weak. Oh, my head is buzzy.

  Silva Vacarro : Fuzzy?

  Baby Doll : Hmm. Fuzzy and buzzy. My head is swingin' round. Must have been that swingin' that done it.

• Baby Doll : [Silva caresses her neck]  Don't touch me. Please, don't touch me. I don't like to be touched.

  Silva Vacarro : Well, why do you giggle?

  Baby Doll : Cause you make me feel kinda hysterical, Mr. Vacarro.

  Silva Vacarro : [knowing smile]  I do?

  Baby Doll : [starts to get up]  Mr. Vacarro, I think I'll go make us some lemonade.

  [he holds her back] 

  Baby Doll : What did you do that for?

  Silva Vacarro : I don't want to be deprived of the pleasure of your company. Not yet.

  Baby Doll : Mr. Vacarro, you certainly are getting familiar.

  Silva Vacarro : Don't you have any fun loving spirit about you?

  Baby Doll : Well, this isn't fun.

  [laughs breathlessly and smiles] 

  Silva Vacarro : Why do you giggle then? Hmm?

  Baby Doll : Because I'm ticklish.

• Baby Doll : We had an agreement that - I mean, I told him that on my twentieth birthday I'd be ready.

  Silva Vacarro : That's tomorrow.

  Baby Doll : Uh-huh.

  Silva Vacarro : And, are you - will you be ready?

  Baby Doll : Well, that all depends.

  Silva Vacarro : What on?

  Baby Doll : Whether or not the furniture comes back. I guess.

  Silva Vacarro : Your husband sweats more than any man I know and now I can understand why.

• Baby Doll : I get so depressed goin' through all them empty rooms.

  Silva Vacarro : All the rooms empty?

  Baby Doll : All except the nursery and the kitchen. The stuff in them rooms is paid for.

  Silva Vacarro : You have a child in the nursery?

  Baby Doll : Me? No! I sleep in the nursery myself. I let the slats down on the crib.

  Silva Vacarro : Why do you sleep in the nursery?

  Baby Doll : Mr. Vacarro, that's a personal question.

• Silva Vacarro : All right, Marshal, what's you gonna do about findin' the man that burned down my Gin?

  Man sitting with the Marshal : Boy, what makes you think your Gin was set fire to?

  Silva Vacarro : Look around you. Did you ever see so many happy faces? Looks like a rich man's funeral with all his relations attending.

• Town Marshal : My advice is: you not to make any more reckless charges. Cause you bein' a foreigner, you already got strike one and strike two against you.

  Silva Vacarro : I want no advice, no law, no court in this county. I come from a very old country way of tradition where each man to make his own justice! Like bootleg liquor. Private! In secret. Because they was corruption in there too. And if justice was executed, it was executed by each man himself. Alone! I mean biblical justice. Eye for eye. Tooth for tooth

• Archie Lee Meighan : Oh, Baby Doll! Come out here! Come here. Come here, Baby Doll. I want you to come right over here and meet Mr. Vacarro from the Syndicate Plantation. Say, what's your first name Vacarro?

  Silva Vacarro : Silva.

  Archie Lee Meighan : How you spell it?

  Silva Vacarro : Capital s-i-l-v-a.

  Archie Lee Meighan : Sure enough? Like a sliva linin'? Well, every cloud has got a silva linin'!

  Baby Doll : Oh, what's that from - the Bible?

  Silva Vacarro : No, the Mother Goose book.

• Silva Vacarro : Dump their garbage in the yard. Ignorance and Indulgence and stink!

  Rock : I thought that young Miss Meighan smelt pretty good.

  Silva Vacarro : You keep your nose with the cotton.

• Silva Vacarro : Both of us had misfortunes on the same day.

  Baby Doll : Hmm?

  Silva Vacarro : You lost your furniture, my cotton gin burned down!

  Baby Doll : Oh, yeah.

  Silva Vacarro : Quite a coincidence.

  Baby Doll : What's that?

  Silva Vacarro : I said it was a coincidence of misfortune.

  Baby Doll : Oh, sure. I mean, what can you do with a bunch of unfurnished rooms.

  Silva Vacarro : Well, you could play hide-n-seek.

  Baby Doll : Not me. I'm not athletic.

• Baby Doll : Sometimes I don't know where to go or what to do.

  Silva Vacarro : Well, that's not uncommon. People enter this world without instruction.

• Baby Doll : That name sounds foreign.

  Silva Vacarro : It is, Mrs. Meighan. I'm known as a wop!

• Silva Vacarro : [Baby Doll listens while taking slow, long sips of coke out of a coca-cola bottle]  People come into this world without instruction of where to go or what to do. So, they wander a little and then go away. Drift for awhile and then vanish. And so make room for new comers. Old goers. New comers. Goin' and comin'. Back and forth. Rush. Rush. Permanence? Nothin'.

• Baby Doll : [Silva gets in the back seat of a broken down car with Baby Doll]  The chauffeur sits in the front seat!

  Silva Vacarro : That seat's got no cushion.

  Baby Doll : Oh, yeah.

• Baby Doll : Excuse my yawn; but, we was up awful late last night. So, you're a wop.

  Silva Vacarro : No, I'm a Sicilian, Mrs. Meighan. A very ancient people.

  Baby Doll : Sish?

  Silva Vacarro : No, Siss-Sicilian. I'm from Corpus Christi.

  Baby Doll : Oh, how unusual.

• Baby Doll : I'll be 20 tomorrow. Tomorrow is Election Day and my Burthday and the day that Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected President for his first term.

  Silva Vacarro : It's a great day for the country for both reasons.

  Baby Doll : Oh, he was a man to respect.

  Silva Vacarro : Well, you're a lady to respect, Mrs. Meighan.

  Baby Doll : Me? Oh, I never got past the fourth grade.

  Silva Vacarro : Why'd you quit?

  Baby Doll : Well, I had a great deal of trouble with long division.

• Silva Vacarro : Now, I don't think you need worry about your failure with long division. After all, you got through short division. Short divisions all a lady ought to be called on to cope with.

• Silva Vacarro : What's the matter, Mrs. Meighan? Can't you collect your thoughts? You're minds a blank on the subject? Hmm?

• Silva Vacarro : Let's swing a little, huh? You seem all tense. Motion relaxes people. It's like a cradle! A cradle relaxes a baby. They call you Baby, don't they?

  Baby Doll : Oh, that's sort of a nickname.

  Silva Vacarro : Well, in a swing you relax just like in a cradle.

• Silva Vacarro : You're a very delicate woman, Mrs. Meighan.

  Baby Doll : Delicate? Me?

  Silva Vacarro : There isn't much of you; but, what there is - is choice. Delectable, I might say.

  Baby Doll : Huh?

  Silva Vacarro : You're fine fibered. Soft and smooth.

• Silva Vacarro : You make me think of cotton. No! No fabric or cloth, not even satin or silk cloth, and no kind of fiber, not even cotton fiber, has the absolute delicacy to your skin.

  Baby Doll : Well, what should I say? Thanks or somethin'?

  Silva Vacarro : No, you just smile, Mrs. Meighan. You got an attractive smile. Dimples.

  Baby Doll : No.

  Silva Vacarro : Yes, you do. Come on now, smile, Mrs. Meighan. There! You see. You do. You do have 'em.

• Silva Vacarro : I believe in ghosts. In haunted places. In places haunted by the people that occupy them with hearts overrun by demons of hate and destruction.

• Archie Lee Meighan : Now, don't go gitten hysterical.

  Silva Vacarro : You gotta lot of wagons out on the roadway.

  Archie Lee Meighan : Now, you I-talians are...

  Silva Vacarro : Never mind about we Italians!

• Baby Doll : [crying]  She's got no business leavin' me alone here. But, she has a passion for chocolate candy, though. She watches the newspapers just like a hawk to see if anybody she knows is registered at the county hospital.

  Silva Vacarro : Hospital?

  Baby Doll : Yeah. They pass out candy to the patients at the county hospital, you know, friends and relatives send them flowers and candy and Aunt Rose Comfort goes to visit them and eats up all their chocolate candy.

• Baby Doll : I told my daddy that I wasn't ready for marriage and my daddy told Archie Lee that I wasn't ready for it and Archie Lee promised my daddy that he would wait until I was ready.

  Silva Vacarro : Then, the marriage was postponed.

  Baby Doll : Oh, no. Not the weddin'! We had the weddin'. My daddy gave me away.

  Silva Vacarro : But, you said Archie Lee waited?

  Baby Doll : Yeah! After the weddin' he waited.

  Silva Vacarro : For what?

  Baby Doll : For me to be ready for marriage.

  Silva Vacarro : Well, how long did he have to wait?

  Baby Doll : Oh, he's still waitin'.

• Silva Vacarro : Do you believe in ghosts, Mrs. Meighan? I do. I believe in the presence of evil spirits.

  Baby Doll : What evil spirits you talkin' about?

  Silva Vacarro : Spirits of violence - and cunning - malevolence - cruelty - treachery - destruction.

  Baby Doll : Them's just human characteristics.

  Silva Vacarro : They're evil spirits that haunt the human heart and take possession of it and spread from one human heart to another human heart - the way that a fire goes springin' from leaf to leaf and branch to branch in a tree till a forest is all aflame with it!

  Baby Doll : You just got fire on the brain.

  Silva Vacarro : I see it as more than it seems to be on the surface. I saw it last night as an explosion of those evil spirits - I fought it! I ran into it, beatin' it, stampin' it, shoutin' a curse of God at it! They dragged me out, suffocatin'. I was defeated! When I came to, lying on the ground - a fire had won the battle and all around was a ring of human figures! I looked up. And they were illuminated! Their eyes, their teeth were shinin' - like this! Yeah, like this!

  Baby Doll : No, don't - don't scare me.

  Silva Vacarro : Like this!

  Baby Doll : Please don't scare me!

  Silva Vacarro : The faces I saw were grinning' and then I knew. I knew the fire was not accidental. And you know it was not accidental too.

• Silva Vacarro : Mrs. Meighan, I'm a Sicilian! You know, we're a very old race of people, an ancient race, and ancient races aren't trustful races by nature.

• Baby Doll : What am I gonna do?

  Silva Vacarro : You're gonna do what I tell you!

• Baby Doll : You don't have to go all the way home to take a nap. You could take a nap here. I mean, it's gonna rain anyhow.

  Silva Vacarro : But all the furnitures been removed from the house?

  Baby Doll : Not the stuff in the nursery. There's a small bed in there. A crib. You could curl up and let the slats down.

  Silva Vacarro : I'll be happy to accept the invitation. Come on up and see me to sleep.

• Baby Doll : You'll have to take pot luck.

  Silva Vacarro : I wouldn't be putting you out?

  Baby Doll : Oh, excuse me, I better get into my clothes.

• Baby Doll : Archie Lee, I don't think this discussion is necessary in front of company.

  Silva Vacarro : Mrs. Meighan, when someone feels uncomfortable over somethin', it often happens that he takes out his annoyance on some completely innocent person.

• Silva Vacarro : [dips his bread into a pot of soaked greens]  Colored folks call this pot liquor.

  Baby Doll : [laughs]  I love pot liquor!

  [Mr. Vacarro feeds Baby Doll some pot liquor] 

  Silva Vacarro : Good?

  Baby Doll : I'm crazy about pot liquor! Mmmm! Mmmm, It's good!

  [sticks her tongue out and licks her lips] 

  Baby Doll : Mmmm, that's good.

  [Mr. Vacarro feeds her some more] 

• Silva Vacarro : You know and I know and I know that you know that I know.

• Silva Vacarro : I'm foreign, Meighan; but, not revengeful - at least not more than is rightful. Now, we got a workable good neighbor policy between us. It might work out, anyhow, I think it deserves a try.