NFR Project: 'Baby Face' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘Baby Face’

Dir: Alfred E. Green

Scr: Gene Markey, Kathryn Scola, Daryl Zanuck

Pho: James Van Trees

Ed: Howard Bretherton

Premiere: July 1, 1933

76 min.

Here’s another pre-Code film that got audiences all hot and bothered.

Technically, it was produced under the auspices of the censorious Code, but the Code was not strictly enforced until 1934, so it squeaked in under the wire. In it, a lack of sexual modesty leads to . . . not to doom and damnation, but to great things.

The movie stars a young Barbara Stanwyck as the ravishing and streetwise Lily. She’s a kid working in her father’s speakeasy in Erie, Pennsylvania. She’s routinely manhandled by the miners and factory workers that frequent the joint, and we soon find out that her dad’s been pimping her out since she was 14.

When her dad dies in an accident, despairing as to how to advance, she is counseled by an older man to follow the doctrine of Nietzsche’s “will to power.” She can’t get through his books, but she gets the message, and soon begins sleeping her way to the top.

She leaves for New York, stowing away on a freight train with her African American friend Chico. When they’re busted by a railroad guard, Lily trades a roll in the hay for the free trip to the big city. Her body is negotiable tender. In the big city, she sleeps her way into an entry-level position at a big corporation. Then she sleeps with a young executive, played by John Wayne who recommends her to his boss. Whom she sleeps with.

As she rises in the company, so the camera rises up the side of an enormous skyscraper to show her new location in the hierarchy. (Up and up the phallic symbol she goes, finally coming out on top.) Another executive and his father-in-law fall for her, leading to a murder/suicide. Seemingly above the scandal, she then hooks up with the playboy bank president. She marries him.

Is their no comeuppance for this sinful young woman. No, not really. The bank folds due to mismanagement, and her husband is blamed. He asks her for financial help (she’s saved up half a million dollars in cash and jewelry), but she refuses. He shoots himself.

Badly wounded, he is transported to the hospital, and she goes with him, because she loves him, by golly. Her money and gems scatter across the ambulance floor, and she states that none of it matters. Curtain.

So there is redemption of a sort, but it’s half-hearted. Her acquisition of money and power are much more interesting than her sudden change of heart. This subversive film is basically a blueprint for getting to Easy Street by being easy.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Duck Soup.