Baby Face

Boy, some of those pre-Code films were salacious. Baby Face, from 1933, and directed by Alfred E. Green, was supposedly the film that most responsible for starting the Code in the first place, as it stars Barbara Stanwyck as a woman who sleeps her way to the top.

Of course, all of this is implied, but it would take someone incredibly obtuse not to get it. The film begins in Erie, Pennsylvania, where Stanwyck is working as a barmaid in her father's speakeasy. A patron pays her father some money to be left alone with her, and we get it that dear old dad is pimping her out, and according to Stanwyck, since she was fourteen years old.

When her father dies after being blown up in his still, she takes the train to New York. She has been encouraged by an old cobbler who reads Nietzsche, and he tells her to use men, and that all life is exploitation (these lines were re-dubbed in re-releases). She tries that out when she hops a freighter with her faithful friend Chico (Theresa Harris, who happens to be black, but this is never an issue). When a railroad yard worker attempts to throw them out, she smiles at him and says they can work it out. A closeup of the lantern being turned off is shown, and she's made her first conquest.

Stanwyck then works her way up the ladder at a bank, seducing men at each level (a clever shot pans upward to a new floor each time she gets a promotion). Men are putty in her hands, and she ends up seducing the big boss of the bank, after she has already seduced his son-in-law-to-be. A murder-suicide results, and she's off to Paris, where she ends up with the new president of the bank (George Brent). But this time, she just might be in love.

If you look at it one way, Baby Face's script could be one for a porn film, with all the sex cut out. I can certainly see why 1933 sensibilities were ruffled, as the implications are so strong that it would make a deacon blush. Stanwyck, who made a bunch of these pre-Code films, was very good at projecting a slow-simmering sexuality. She could give a look that made everyone understand just what she was getting at.

Baby Face isn't very good but of great interest, historically. No flesh is shown, but it's as dirty as anything that used to be shown on Times Square.