Baby Face (film)
| Baby Face | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Alfred E. Green |
| Produced by |
William LeBaron Raymond Griffith |
| Screenplay by |
Gene Markey Kathryn Scola |
| Story by | Mark Canfield |
| Starring |
Barbara Stanwyck George Brent |
| Music by |
Harry Akst Ralph Erwin Fritz Rotter Beth Slater Whitson |
| Cinematography | James Van Trees |
| Edited by | Howard Bretherton |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. |
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Release date
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Running time
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71 mins. 75 mins. (restored version) |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $187,000 (estimated) |
Baby Face is a 1933 American Pre-Code dramatic film directed by Alfred E. Green, and starring Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent. Based on a story by Darryl F. Zanuck (under the pseudonym Mark Canfield), this sexually-charged Pre-Code Hollywood film is about an attractive young woman who uses sex to advance her social and financial status.
Marketed with the salacious tag line, "She had it and made it pay", the film's open discussion of sex made it one of the most notorious films of the Pre-Code Hollywood era and helped bring the era to a close. The New York Times quotes Mark A. Vieira, author of Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood as saying, "'Baby Face' was certainly one of the top 10 films that caused the Production Code to be enforced."
Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck) works for her drunken, dissolute father in a speakeasy during Prohibition in Erie, Pennsylvania. Her life is miserable; since the age of 14, her father (Robert Barrat) has had her sleep with many of his customers. The only man she trusts, a cobbler who admires Friedrich Nietzsche, is upset with her lack of ambition and counsels her to try for greater things. When Lily's father is killed when his still explodes, she sheds no tears for him. She visits the cobbler, who tells her to make for the city and stop letting men use her but rather to ruthlessly use her power over men for her own benefit. She and her African American co-worker/friend Chico (Theresa Harris) hop on a freight train out of town, but are discovered by a railroad worker who threatens to have them thrown in jail. She says, "Wait ... can't we talk this over?" It is strongly implied that she has sex with him in the shadows of the darkened boxcar to get him to change his mind.
In New York City, Lily sees the soaring Gotham Trust tower and asks a security guard about jobs. He directs her to the personnel department, where an aide asks Lily, "Have you had any experience?", to which Lily replies, "Plenty!" She then entices the aide into his absent boss's office to demonstrate. She lands a job in the filing department. Her progress, sleeping her way to the top, is shown in a recurring visual metaphor of the movie camera panning ever upward along the edifice of the Gotham Trust's skyscraper, accompanied by the saxophone wail of "Saint Louis Blues". With each advance up the ladder, she becomes colder and more ruthless.
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Wikipedia