Tonight's movie was "Baby Face" (1933). It was part of my "Forbidden Hollywood" collection, and was the most suggestive of all the pre-Code movies I've seen so far. I'm sure it was downright scandalous for it's time.
Northridge's own Barbara Stanwyck stars as a young woman who lives and works in a Speakeasy that is run by her lout of a father. His Speakeasy is a converted house that is near a steel mill full of thirsty, macho workers who like their illicit beer (this is during Prohibition). One man also wants something else. He wants "Baby Face", the young Miss Stanwyck. This man is a powerful local official, and seeing as how he has protected the owner of the Speakeasy from the police, he is now expecting the favors of his daughter.
So of course the father pimps her out to the man. Now we are seeing just how realistic things were getting in the early sound era, before the Hays Code set in and movies became Glitzed Up. This scene is depicted as luridly as it would be today, and it looks like real life.
Barbara Stanwyck hates her father, but she is soon free of him because his whiskey still explodes and he is killed by the fire. Now she is on her own, but with no idea of where to turn. An older man comes to visit her, a nice gentleman of German extraction who had been a customer of the Speakeasy. He encourages her to strike out on her own in life, and gives her a book to read : Nietzsche's "Will To Power", a work of philosophy that in my opinion would bring out the worst, most selfish instincts in the most gullible or greedy readers. Screw Nietzsche.....
But Babs doesn't think so. Soon she gets ideas to use her feminine wiles as she was trained to do by her sick perverted father, only now, she is working for herself instead of him.
She moves to New York with her black female servant (who she treats well and relies upon), and soon Babs is working at a major Manhattan bank. She gets her hair permed and uses her looks to then begin to climb the ladder of corporate success by sleeping her way to the top. This ascension is presented in the most direct way possible for 1933. Though there is no nudity nor sex depicted, the level of innuendo is every bit as shocking. I have remarked before that, for many of us who grew up in the 1960s and beyond, in a more open era, we tend to look back and think of folks from the past as "squares" or even prudes in some cases. I think a lot of this cultural judgement comes from the pre-conditioning we all have from the movies of that era. Movies are images, after all, and the images we have from the late 30s through the mid-60s are ones of restriction, even inhibition or neutering. The characters aren't necessarily neutered but their actions are, in the movies made after the Code was instituted. So we got this image of people from the 30s and 40s as slick, sleek romantics, but they are also straight talkers who never utter a word of innuendo, unless you count some of the milder imagery of Bogie lighting two cigarettes and things like that. Don't get me wrong, I love the deep romance of 40s movies, even if it was fantasized, because romance should be fantasized. A love affair should be shown as something magical, a real life fantasy.
But in the matter of telling all kinds of stories, even the most sordid ones, the Hays Code knocked out a lot of the most forthright depictions of negative behavior by everyday characters, and so the moviegoers of the late 30s no longer got to see real life characters such as Barbara Stanwyck's "Baby Face".
This film is a revelation, not because it's any great artistic achievement, but because it shoves this woman's predicament and her subsequent behavior in the face of the viewer, and forces you to watch her play out the string of her entanglements. She is riding high to the top, the vice presidents of the bank are her dupes because she is beautiful and smart and she has got what they want.
But then of course conflicts arise, because there is more than one man involved, and tragedy results.
I'll say no more, but this is a very modern film for it's time, which is really our time or any time. It is a stark tale of the misguided ambition of a woman driven by subconscious forces, who doesn't find out what love is until it's too late....
If I were to suggest one pre-Code film to you, it would be this one, the 76 minute uncensored version of "Baby Face".
Two Big Thumbs Up.
See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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