Baby Face (Warner Bros., 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, August 20) was the Turner Classic Movies “Summer Under the Stars” tribute to Barbara Stanwyck, my choice for the finest actress of Hollywood’s Golden Age, mainly because of her versatility. She could play literally anything: drama, romance, crime, screwball comedy, Westerns, even musicals (she never made a full-dress musical but she could sing and she does so in several films, including The Purchase Price, Ball of Fire and Lady of Burlesque). No other actress in classic Hollywood even approached her range, and only one other woman (Meryl Streep) has done so since. I ended up catching four films in the Stanwyck marathon: Baby Face (1933), Executive Suite (1954), Clash by Night (1952) and Night Nurse (1931). I had seen all of them except Executive Suite before, and I’d seen Baby Face back in 1997 on my very first viewing of TCM after Cox Cable added it to their basic-cable lineup. They were doing an afternoon of movies that had had trouble with the censors, and back then I didn’t like it much mainly because TCM scheduled it right after Sadie Thompson (1927), a masterpiece (despite the fact that currently extant prints are missing the last reel and outtakes and stills from star Gloria Swanson’s archives are used to fill out the film and approximate the original ending) written and directed by Raoul Walsh from W. Somerset Maugham’s short story “Miss Thompson” and the play John Colton and Clemence Randolph adapted from it called Rain. Seen right after Sadie Thompson, a work of art which treated prostitution and its appeal with sympathy and depth, Baby Face looked cheaper and more exploitative than I suspect it would have on its own.

The plot casts Stanwyck as Lily Powers, a girl from an industrial town who’s working as essentially an indentured servant for her father Nick (Robert Barrat), who runs a speakeasy that caters to the local factory workers, all of whom seem to frequent Lily for beers (during Prohibition) and to sexually harass her. (To paraphrase a much later Warner Bros. movie, “Everybody comes to Nick’s.”) Lily is befriended by an old German cobbler named Adolf Cragg (Alphonse Ethier), who gives her a copy of Nietzsche’s book Will to Power and tells her to follow its advice and be a master, not a slave. What that means in practice is he wants Lily to move to a big city and use her obvious sex appeal to move her way up in the world and accumulate the good material things of the world. She follows his advice by making her way to New York with her Black friend and (ultimately) maid Chico (Theresa Harris), stowing away on a train and successfully seducing the guard who finds her and threatens to have her arrested. She then sets her sights at the Gotham Trust Company bank and seduces various males in the bank’s employ to work her way up through the hierarchy. Baby Face was based on a story by “Mark Canfield,” an alias for then-Warner Bros. production chief Darryl F. Zanuck, though the actual script was by Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola, and it was directed by the sporadically interesting Alfred E. Green. One neat trick Green and the writers pulled was to illustrate Lily’s progress through the bank’s hierarchy (and the men employed there) by a series of panning shots of the bank’s central headquarters, a New York skyscraper, with each floor labeled on the outside as Lily rises in both her income and her level.

Along the way the men she exploits sexually include Jimmy McCoy, Jr. (a young John Wayne, instantly recognizable even though you’re likely to react, “What’s John Wayne doing in a movie like this?”), Brody (Douglass Dumbrille), Ned Stevens (Donald Cook) – fiancé of Ann Carter (Margaret Lindsay, already “typed” as the “good girl” to the female lead’s “bad girl,” a role she’d later play opposite Bette Davis), daughter of the bank’s CEO, J. R. Carter (Henry Kolker), and eventually J. R. Carter himself. During her rake’s progress Lily has sex with Brody in the women’s restroom; Stevens catches them and threatens to fire her but Lily throws herself at him to persuade him not to. Later Carter fires Stevens for having cheated on his daughter with Lily, but Lily is able to seduce him and ultimately becomes his mistress. Only recently fired Stevens gets jealous and follows Lily to the apartment Carter is paying for, where she finds her with him and shoots first Carter and then himself. This causes a scandal that forces the bank to send Lily off to Paris to work in their French branch, and to recruit Courtland Trenholm (George Brent, second-billed even though he’s only in the last 20 minutes or so), grandson of the bank’s founder, to take over as CEO. Only Courtland has to go to Paris on bank business, and Lily goes after him, eventually getting him to marry her – which back home in New York sparks a scandal that starts a run on the bank, rendering it insolvent almost overnight. Courtland and Lily return home and Courtland is arrested for bank fraud and tells Lily he needs $500,000 to keep himself out of prison. When she refuses to give back all the bonds, jewelry and other items he and her previous paramours had bestowed on her, Courtland shoots himself, but in a scene obviously tacked on to satisfy the censors he’s merely wounded, not dead, and Lily turns up in the ambulance taking him to the hospital and pledging to remain faithful to him both financially and sexually.

Baby Face exists in two separate versions, an original, rediscovered in 2004 – the one TCM showed last night – and a heavily censored version released in June 1933 which featured an even tackier ending in which Lily and Courtland retreat to the small town where she grew up and he takes a job in the factory, ending up poor but honest instead of rich and licentious. It also changed Cragg’s advice to Lily just before she leaves the small town to be more “moral.” Barbara Stanwyck liked the script because it gave her the chance to be more “glamorous” and wear height-of-fashion clothes and jewels, though she also insisted on a script rewrite that established her father had been pimping her out all along, so she was used to being exploited sexually and saw her New York exploits as turning the tables on the male gender. I liked Baby Face a bit better than I had the last time, but it still seems a fundamentally exploitative movie and hardly in the same league as its admitted model, MGM’s Red-Headed Woman (1932), with Jean Harlow playing essentially the same character Stanwyck plays here but playing her for laughs.