Obscenity is a quaint term. It makes me think of soiled lavender sachets and long-settled Supreme Court cases. Even the most famous Supreme Court declaration on obscenity (Justice Potter's concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio), which gave us the memorable standard "I know it when I see it," finished, less famously and somewhat deflatedly: "...and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." Not obscene, that is.

But the Catholic Legion of Decency found things obscene all the time. A film industry watchdog that wielded an unbelievable amount of power over moviegoing Catholics in the '50s and '60s, the Legion of Decency reserved its most loathsome rating (C, meaning "condemned") for Baby Doll, a film written especially for the screen by Tennessee Williams in 1956. Masculin, féminin was also condemned, as was Breathless. The Catholic Church still makes these kinds of judgments, although they're less fanatical now. The successor organization to the Legion of Decency, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Office for Film and Broadcasting, originally rated Brokeback Mountain L ("limited adult audience"). They upgraded to O ("morally offensive") only after pressure from conservative groups. How the mighty have fallen.

But the Catholics were on to something with Baby Doll. Watch that 1956 film now. I triple-dog dare you. Baby Doll, part of a new box set of works written by Williams, is utterly, horrifyingly, wonderfully, indisputably obscene. All this with no nudity and exclusively offscreen sex.

In the first scene of the movie, directed by Elia Kazan, a balding slob of a man named Archie Lee (Karl Malden) scampers up the staircase of his rotting Southern mansion. His striped pajama bottoms hang baggy, and he hangs loose inside them. He sneaks around a corner into an empty room, crouches next to a gaping hole in the brick, and punctures the plaster with his penknife, then slowly widens the hole. In a tight iris shot, we see the scene on the other side of the wall. Baby Doll (the incredible Carroll Baker) sprawls lazily across a low crib, slowly sucking on her thumb. One close-up shows her lips moving up and down her spit-slicked thumb; then, timed precisely to her movements, the knife thrusts in and out of the hole. In three shots, Baby Doll gets nastier than most hardcore porn.

Nineteen-year-old Baby Doll is married to Archie, but she won't have sex with him until her 20th birthday (which happens to be the next day). Then Silva (Eli Wallach), the Italian head of the cotton syndicate that put Archie out of business, comes onto the scene. Approximately half of the film is made up of Silva seducing Baby Doll on her front lawn as she becomes visibly, unconsciously aroused (always completely clothed); another quarter shows Baby Doll coming down from her deflowering ("I feel cool and rested for the first time in my life," she drawls) while the black servants in the household look on. recommended

annie@thestranger.com