During their 14-year marriage, the actress Carroll Baker and the writer, director, and acting teacher Jack Garfein produced two children and one film. The film, 1961’s “Something Wild,” was independently financed and released through United Artists, primarily on the strength of Ms. Baker’s marquee value.

It would be nice to be able to say that the response to “Something Wild” upon its release was polarized, but in truth, outside of Europe it was uniformly panned. As the United Artists catalogue has changed hands over the years, the film has virtually vanished from repertory screens. Until now, that is. Starting today, IFC Center will run a new print of Ms. Baker’s and Mr. Garfein’s collaboration for one week.

Based upon Alex Karmel’s novel “Mary Ann,” about a young Manhattan student’s descent into despair after a rape and her subsequent re-birth of sorts, “Something Wild” must have seemed like a safe bet for investors. Ms. Baker had earned both professional validation in the form of an Oscar nomination and condemnation from various moralist organizations for the title role in Elia Kazan’s 1956 hothouse southern gothic oddity, “Baby Doll.”

Mr. Garfein had received critical accolades for his theater work and his film-directing debut, 1957’s “The Strange One.”

But “The Strange One” Mr. Garfein’s film isn’t. Though it ostensibly details a young woman’s search for identity and her struggles to trust and to love after a traumatic experience, the film is more an amorphous chronicle than a coherent, character-driven narrative journey.

Mr. Garfein and Ms. Baker’s efforts to make visible Mary Ann’s tormented post-rape inner life are both nonspecific and heavy handed. The rape itself features a particularly unfortunate union of edgy subject matter and off-the-rack film grammar, as the act is consummated during a mid-attack dissolve like one would expect to see in an early 1960s Hollywood love scene.

Once circumstances bring Mary Ann together with Mike (Ralph Meeker), a lonely mechanic who thwarts Mary Ann’s suicide attempt, the film becomes a single-set filmed play. Ms Baker and Mr. Garfein met at Lee Strasberg’s justifiably famous “theater laboratory,” the Actor’s Studio, the famously clichéd question of which was is, of course, “what’s my motivation?” And that’s precisely the question that “Something Wild” begs in its latter half.

In light of the evident passion and sacrifice of everyone involved in the story, it seems somewhat cruel to ask: What is Mike’s motivation? What’s Mary Ann’s motivation? Mike’s mystifying need to rehabilitate Mary Ann by imprisoning her only makes sense if you subscribe to the Kim Ki-Duk school of stalking as courtship. Between binge drinking sessions and deliberate acts of disfigurement, Mike and Marry Ann arbitrarily take turns running to or recoiling from each other. It’s a unusual approach to storytelling, to say the least.

As “Something Wild” moves toward an admittedly unpredictable ending, chockablock with teeth-gnashing histrionics and big scenes, it plays like a well-intentioned attempt by an experienced cast to bring to life script material that might best have stayed in the typewriter. Mary Ann and her mother’s repeating, “what… has… happened…?” to each other when they’re reunited late in the film is silly and self-conscious sub-Arthur Miller dialogue, no matter how earnestly the lines are spoken and no matter how completely unpacked in rehearsal each syllable must no doubt have been.

The honest energies of Ms. Baker, Mr. Meeker, Mildred Dunnock as Mary Ann’s mother, and future Edith Bunker Jean Stapleton in a memorably bizarre cameo, gives “Something Wild” a few other saving graces. When Mary Ann embarks on one of those ubiquitous ’60s movie-city wanders, á la Catherine Denueuve’s in “Repulsion,” Julie Christie in “Billy Liar” and Rod Steiger’s in “The Pawnbroker,” for a contemporary New York audience “Something Wild” becomes something fascinating.

Shooting on location in a Harlem five-and-dime, an actual flophouse doubtless now the site of a luxury coop, the Williamsburg Bridge, and in the Lower East Side, Mr. Garfein and his cinematographer, Eugen Schüfftan (colenser of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and a far better-funded, crafted, and more digestibly Hollywood-styled seamy slice of movie life, “The Hustler”), inadvertently created a time capsule of a late 1950s New York that no longer exists outside of Weegee photographs and other forgotten films like this one.

Also, for credit sequence completists, “Something Wild” contains perhaps the rarest and arguably one of the best title sequences from frequent Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger collaborator Saul Bass. A tightly constructed mesh of urban images, intersecting lines, cutting tempo and motion, Bass’s titles set up the film better than the story ultimately acquits itself.

“Something Wild” remains a unique cinematic curio and an object lesson in what a potential black hole for good intentions and stimulating collaboration that American independent feature filmmaking remains.

Through January 2 (323 Sixth Avenue at West 3rd Street, 212-924-7771).