The Baby (1973) 84m.
What did audiences make of this when they saw it in cinemas in 1973? If you think Grant and Hepburn had problems bringing up Baby, then check this one out. Social worker Anjanette Comer drops in on Ruth Roman and her grown-up daughters to assess their backward son, Baby. But no ordinary case, this: the son is just as grown up as the rest of the family. You may find yourself giggling with disbelief or maybe just embarrassment as full-grown adult David Manzy gurgles and coos in baby-talk and crawls on the floor in his diaper, while everybody standing around him acts as if everything is completely normal - which it would be after a while, I suppose. Nevertheless, watching Baby scrambling around at floor level while a room of men and women are going about their own business at a birthday party is still hard to swallow, and it's not as if we'd had plenty of opportunity to get adjusted to the film's screwy tone by that time. The sheer excess of its sensibilities - look out for that cattle prod, Baby! - pushes it aside from any measurable notions of success or failure. For a start, it's unclear exactly what genre THE BABY aspires to be (although the last half, complete with a musical score of dragging cellos and tinkly piano, heads unsteadily into horror territory). Then there's the acting. And the screenplay. And the ending, which in any other film would be plain ludicrous, but at least here remains in keeping with the anti-logic of the rest of the story.
What makes THE BABY a sort of schlocky-campy classic (and surely a billing of 'Strange Film Festivals' everywhere) is its admirable disregard for reason. You can't find holes in a story if there is no rational framework for them to exist in. Nothing makes sense: characters do terrible things and earn no repercussions; Baby is an adult but still hasn't figured out how to step over the two-foot wall of his play pen; similarly, unless Baby has been castrated there's no reason for him to speak in a baby's voice (this very grating effect is dubbed in); and I don't see how can it be possible for any person in Baby's situation, irrespective of mental ability, not to be capable of learning a few words of English - even kids raised by wolves learn to growl, for heaven's sake. You won't be able to avoid asking yourself questions while you're watching, either - for example, what kind of babysitter would want to change a grown man's diaper? (not one I would feel comfortable trusting, that's for sure). Manzy gets his expression of infant obliviousness down pat, but you have to wonder what was happening between takes - he was probably rightly figuring that his career was beginning and ending with this assignment. I don't even want to contemplate the attraction this film might have amongst fetishists. Everyone else should see it at least once.
sburridge@hotmail.com
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