Trouble In Paradise: Baby Face
Look, SFist is covering the Pacific Film Archive's Trouble In Paradise: Pre-Code Hollywood series because we think you should know about it and because (disclosure) it means we can walk past a "Sold Out" sign and a crowd of disappointed Berkeleyan film buffs at showtime, claim our free tickets and watch the movie. But our only real complaint about the series so far is that each film is only screening once, so if you weren't with us on Saturday night in the first West Coast audience to see the restored version of Baby Face, reader, you missed it and that's on you. We told you about it, twice.
In the spring of 1933, the New York State board of censors told Warner Brothers studios that director Alfred E. Green's new film Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck (above) as Lily Powers, was unacceptable even by precode standards. That meant the WB couldn't show it in New York City, and that meant Baby Face wouldn't make any money, so they released a (slightly) tamer, edited version in July of the same year. Sometime last year at the Library of Congress, archivist Michael Mashon came across a negative of the unedited version and restored Baby Face to its full, amoral, transgressive glory. After the closing credits, he appended three scenes from the edited version, just so we would know what previous audiences had missed. SFist has a new favorite use for our federal tax dollars.
During the film, Lily Powers is described as a "ravishing" and "devastating" beauty, and she is exactly that; her beauty more or less allows her to destroy everything that gets in her way from being the poor, abused, pimped-out daughter of a speakeasy operator in Erie, PA to marrying the president of the Gotham Trust Company in (where else?) New York, NY. Every time we think Lily's power has deserted her--when she's confronted by some male authority figure or another with her sinful ways--she bats her eyelashes, the orchestra plays "St. Louis Blues," and the camera pans vertically up the exterior of the Gotham Trust Company to show us that Lily is literally movin' on up.
In one of the scenes that the New York censors insisted upon removing, Lily sits down with Nietzsche's Thoughts Out Of Season, and reads: "crush out all sentiment." It's funny to imagine a state agency concerned with a dead German philosopher's effect on the moviegoing public, of course, but watching Baby Face, we were more struck (as we were when we saw I'm No Angel) by how thoroughly the film follows that directive. Lily is a compelling and heroic character; she gets ahead the best way she can; she kicks ass and is more or less unconcerned with taking names. In an early scene, when a local politician has paid her father for some, um, alone time with Lily, she slaps his face, walks calmly into the next room and pours herself a beer from a bottle into a glass. When he follows her and grabs her again, she breaks the empty bottle over his head and takes a drink from the glass. Later, a murder-suicide that leaves two of her lovers dead simply and unsentimentally removes two more obstacles along Lily's way. Lily's is a success story in which the heroine uses sex to get her man, her money and her power, and gets away with it.
The Trouble In Paradise series continues at the PFA through August 7. SFist recommends von Sternberg's Blonde Venus (1932, starring Marlene Dietrich and Cary Grant) on July 30. Oh, and Baby Face will be at the Castro September 9 through 11; you'll have another chance after all. Don't miss it.