Baby Face

At the demand of censors, Baby Face was altered before its release—though trying to clean up this story is like trying to sweep up the sand on a beach. The original, uncensored version adds a few sordid moments, but more importantly strips away clumsily inserted moralizing to reveal pure, unrelenting disillusionment. Baby Face has all the kick, the shocking laughs, and the underlying bleakness that define pre-Code. Barbara Stanwyck stars as Lily Powers, who languishes in a dreary steel town where her father pimps her to his speakeasy customers, until she takes the Nietzschean advice of a German cobbler and decides to exploit the men who have exploited her.

Setting her sights on a skyscraper housing a bank, she proceeds to sleep her way up the ladder from lowly file department to lavish penthouse. Lily is scheming, avaricious, selfish and heartless, yet far from asking us to pass judgment on her or to sympathize with the men she uses—a parade of weak-willed saps with only one thing on their filthy minds—the film shamelessly celebrates her triumphs. A low-down, growling rendition of “The St. Louis Blues” accompanies her climb, which is conveyed with such radical, telegraphic efficiency that the film achieves an exhilaratingly witty, insolent style.

A wounded fury festers behind Lily’s defiant poise; all the sullied, loveless transactions she has forced herself into have left a bitter poison that numbs her heart. No one could play the part better than Stanwyck, with her level, unwavering gaze; her sudden lashing rages; the enticing warmth that she could, chillingly, turn on or off at will. The riveting simplicity of her style comes from inner resolve, a hard-won self-mastery that allows her to look at life without fear, though not without anger or sadness. 

by Imogen Sara Smith