Baby face

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Movie
Original title Baby face
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1933
length 70 minutes
Rod
Director Alfred E. Green
script Gene Markey
Darryl F. Zanuck
production William LeBaron for Warner Brothers
camera James Van Trees
cut Howard Bretherton
occupation

Baby Face is a 1933 American film starring Barbara Stanwyck .

action

Lily Powers is a hardy, cynical young girl who illegally serves alcohol in her father's pub and also looks after influential guests personally . When her father dies, Lily jumps on a train with her colored friend Chico and travels to New York, where she wants to prosper. Within a short time, she has a job at a bank and literally falls asleep at the top of the company. She keeps changing lovers until she finally gets to the Vice President. She rejects the board assistant Ned Stevens' marriage proposal and witnesses how the assistant first shoots the vice president and then himself in front of her eyes with a touch of jealousy. The new president of the bank, Courtland Trenholm, sees through Lily and wants to transfer her to the Paris branch. With feminine cunning and prudish prudish, Lily manages to make Courtland fall in love with her and marry her. Lily is almost at the goal of her wishes when the bank threatens to go bankrupt in the maelstrom of the global economic crisis. After many, very unrealistic entanglements, Lily and Courtland become a couple who live poor but happily in Pittsburgh.

background

Baby Face is now regarded as a classic example of pre-code films , which were distributed before the Production Code came into force in June 1934. These strips went as far as they could in depicting sex and violence. Against the background of the global economic crisis, the number of viewers in the USA had fallen dramatically and the studios tried by all means to win back the audience. Nonetheless, by mid-1933 the curve was so overstretched that the studios no longer got any form of selfishness and greed on the screen. The first version of the script, which was discussed with Barbara Stanwyck in November 1932, still contained scenes in which the father beats the underage Lily and pushes against her will into a room in which a customer is already waiting for her screaming Lily locking the door.

In another shot, Lily should dance more or less naked on the bar in front of the audience. In the original version of the film, Courtland begs Lily to move her jewels in order to get a short-term loan. She refuses, pointing to her difficult childhood and all the efforts that it cost her to get rich. Courtland leaves the room and the film ends. After massive interventions by the Hays Office , the censorship authority at the time, it was insisted:

"It is necessary that at the end of the film she is again poor and without social status and that the message gets across that using one's own body for material benefits is bad and condemnable."

Now the movie ends with Lily rushing to Courtland at the last second, stopping him from suicide, driving to the hospital and donating all of her fortune so that Courtland can save the bank from bankruptcy. In the end she lives happily but poorly in Pittsburgh.

This dawning of a moral reaction to excessive permissiveness was not so clearly felt until mid-1933. At the end of 1932 MGM in Feuerkopf , who showed Jean Harlow in a comparable role, was able to forego any morally correct ending and present Harlow in the final shot as the successful concubine of a very rich and very old French marquis. Despite the changes, the film describes the way Lily gets her wealth without any hesitation. During her interview at the bank, Stanwyck is asked if she has any experience. The actress smiles a very suggestive smile and replies curtly:

"Plenty!"

The film alludes to Stanwyck's approach in its slogan:

"She climbs the ladder of success - Man by Man."

Overall, such descriptions were not unusual for the time. In Herz am Scheideweg , the initially poor but honest heroine quickly recognizes in her own words how she can achieve luxury and prosperity:

"The easiest way to luxury is horizontal!"

Joan Crawford sleeps her way up to New York society in All for Your Luck of the same year. Ruth Chatterton used her sexuality in Anybody's Woman with similar success to get out of the slums.

From today's perspective, the character of Chico, an African American and Lily's best friend, is surprising. Both have a very close relationship at the beginning and at no point does Lily treat Chico other than with respect and openness. Theresa Harris' dialogues are free from the grammatical stereotypes that were common in films for African Americans at the time. At one point a lover asks Lily to break up with Chico, as she would no longer fit in with her high social status. Lily answers with cold words:

"Chico stays!"

The quarrel with the censors was one of the reasons that producer Darryl F. Zanuck decided to end his collaboration with Warner Brothers. He founded his own film studio, 20th Century Pictures , which took over the bankrupt Fox Film Corporation in mid-1934 and merged to form 20th Century Fox .

Awards

Web links

Literature on the subject of pre-code films

Footnotes

  1. ↑ It will be necessary […] in the end of the show her stripped of her wealth and social standing and thus drive home the point that the philosophy now in the picture, namely use your body for material advancement, has been entirely defeated and discredited .
  2. ↑ Plenty!
  3. ↑ She climbs up the success ladder. Man for man.
  4. ↑ The easiest way to luxery is horizontally !!
  5. ↑ Chico stays!