Editor Reviews:

Amazon.com essential video:
An earlier Elia Kazan film, the 1949 Pinky, now seems dated because its "scandalous" subject, miscegenation, has become a social nonissue. If anything, the reputation of this legendary 1956 romp about a child bride in the Deep South has shifted the other way; the ripe image of Carol Baker as a mentally challenged nymphet who sucks her thumb as she lures grown men into her crib (an actual crib!) would probably be hounded off the screen today. When it was originally released the film won a "condemned" rating from the Catholic Legion of Decency, but it isn't as explicit as that might suggest. Current audiences are likely to be shocked not by what's actually shown, but by the mere fact that the movie is a comedy, in effect a sex farce, adapted by Tennessee Williams from a couple of his raunchier one-act plays. Karl Malden is the divine cream puff's sad-sack husband, who has agreed to keep hands off until she turns 19; Eli Wallach is a high-stepping rival in the cotton business who harbors no such scruples. --David Chute

Rating : - It's really not just about a woman who sleeps in a crib
When I first heard about this movie, I expected it to be a strange and disturbing film about a grown woman who acts like a baby. Indeed, the early "peeping tom" scene of the husband looking through the hole in the wall at his young wife sleeping in a crib and sucking her thumb is pretty creepy, but that's not really the main focus of the film. There's so much more to this great movie than that, it would be a shame to sensationalize it simply as "the movie where the woman sleeps in a crib."

I have to say it's an intelligent movie. The acting is outstanding, and when I read that Tennesse Williams himself had worked on the screenplay, it made sense to me because the quality of the script didn't seem to be compromised for Hollywood like many plays often are. The characters are certainly more three-dimensional than typical Hollywood movie types. In fact, at times it's hard to decide which characters to be sympathetic to. That's realism at it's best.

There's also no lame, predictable Hollywood ending here. There were a few times that I thought the movie could have ended, but it didn't. I was actually glad when it didn't end though because it made it more interesting.

I have to say, this is one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. And it really has little to do with the fact that one of the main characters sleeps in a crib.