Title: Baby Face
Rating: 4 Stars
In the 1920s, the film industry was considered a modern day Gomorrah. With various scandals regularly popping up in the news, most notorious of them all being the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, the industry was under pressure from political, religious, and civic groups to reform.
Faced with the real possibility of government regulation, in 1927 the film industry started something known as the Hays Code. This was a set of rules that all Hollywood films were to abide by. Among other things, the Code prohibited:
- Any inference of sex perversion
- Ridicule of the clergy
- Miscegnation
- Licentiousness
- Arson
- Prostitution
- Rape or attempted rape
- Sympathy for criminals
- Brutality and possible gruesomeness
- Deliberate seduction of girls
And so on. You get the idea. All films were now to be wholesome, family friendly fare. At first, enforcement was pretty desultory. In 1934, when Joseph Breen took over the office, the Code got teeth. He was able to force studios to make changes to films (eg there was no way that Rick was going to end up with Ilsa in Casablanca). From that point on, the Hays Code pretty much had a stranglehold on Hollywood films until 1968, when it was replaced by the MPAA and the more familiar G, PG, PG-13, and R.
As a result, when you think of films from the 1930s or 1940s, most people have a mental image of sweet little films with virginal ingenues falling in love with their leading men and chastely living happily ever after.
However, there were films made before the Hays Code was fully implemented that definitely do not fit that mold. Called pre-Code films, they provide an interesting point of view of how Hollywood might have progressed if it didn’t force itself to live under the Code for some thirty years.
A great example of a pre-Code film is Baby Face. It stars a young Barbara Stanwyck (her most famous film was probably the film noir Double Indemnity).
Wait until you hear the plot (we’re talking 1933 here, not 1973). Stanwyck is Lily. Her father runs an illegal speakeasy. Lily is kind of a waitress there, but her father has been, apparently for some time, prostituting her out to his customers. It is implied that her first sexual experience was with her father.
After paying her father off and the father, with a smirk, leaving to give them time alone, one of his more prominent customers tries to get from Lily what he paid for. When she fends him off, he tries to rape her. She busts a beer bottle over his head. As he leaves, he rages at her father that he’s going to get the speakeasy shut down. Fortunately for Lily, her father’s illegal still then starts to smoke. He goes down to investigate and he dies in a violent explosion.
Lily is free of her father, but has no idea what to do. One of her kindly customers takes her aside and, believe it or not, quotes from Nietzsche’s philosophy of Will to Power. He encourages her to go out into the world and to use her sexuality to acquire everything that she wants.
She proceeds to do exactly that. She and her best friend, a black woman named Chico, head off to Chicago. They steal onto a freight train and are immediately caught by a railroad worker. She successfully offers her sexual favors in exchange for staying on the train.
In Chicago, she sees a skyscraper and decides that this is where she’s going to make her mark. She marches into the personnel office. She seduces a clerk there by taking him into a vacant office. That got her a job in the filing department.
From that beginning, you can see her quite literally sleeping her way to top. She seduces one man (a very early John Wayne role!) into making a recommendation to his boss (Brody). She then promptly dumps him and takes up with Brody. A bank executive named Stevens catches the two of them in the act at the bank. Brody is fired. Lily throws herself at the mercy of Stevens and tells him a story of how Brody seduced her.
Stevens and Lily then begin an affair. Stevens is engaged to the bank vice president’s daughter. Lily arranges for his fiancé to walk in on the two of them. She goes running off to her father (JP). Stevens, now discredited, leaves the bank. Lily tells another sob story to JP. Yep, you guessed it, she starts an affair with JP. Stevens later catches the two of them in the act, and in desperation he shoots and kills JP and then turns the gun on himself.
The bank, seeking to avoid scandal, try to buy Lily off. Instead, she manages to seduce the bank president, Trenholm. Starting at the first floor, she has now reached the corner office of the top floor. At each move, you can see her dressing better and acquiring more sophisticated manners.
By the end, she has half a million dollars and is married to Trenholm. Will to power indeed. If the film stayed true to itself, it would have stopped there.
However, even in the pre-Code era, apparently that would have been too much. In the final minutes of the film (spoiler alert for a 90 year old film), the bank is in trouble again and it appears that Trenholm is going to jail. He shoots himself but is not dead. Seeing her true love near death causes Lily to realize that her love for Trenholm is more important than any amount of money. The two of them embrace.
Except for that tacked on final bit of morality, this is a great example of a daring pre-Code film. It has at least implied incest, prostitution, murder, suicide, rape, licentiousness, and sympathy for criminals. I’m probably missing others.
Lily is a force of nature that will not allow any man or moral code to stand in her way. She is determined to acquire wealth and ruthlessly uses whatever gifts that have been bestowed upon her to succeed. Stevens’ murder of JP and subsequent suicide barely even register to her. The fact that it is the philosophy of Nietzsche that directly inspires her path of conquest from speakeasy waitress / prostitute to living in a penthouse with a butler and chauffeur is pretty hilarious.
It’s a short film, somewhere around 76 minutes, so other than the A to B to C plot machinations, there’s not a lot of character development. Therefore, it’s not a great film, but it is still a great example of a pre-Code film.
dorkenstein 