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Movies :: Hard-boiled Heroine Three movies from the early '30s -- each starring Barbara Stanwyck -- prove they don't make 'em like they used to. Pre-Code Barbara Stanwyck --at the Brattle Theatre. by Betsy Sherman
Tonight starts a week long celebration of three movies from my favorite Hollywood period -- the early '30s "pre-Code" years -- starring my favorite American actress, Barbara Stanwyck. The main attraction is the recently discovered uncensored version of the 1933 "Baby Face," the notoriously hard-boiled drama in which a poor but determined gal uses sex to rise from pavement to penthouse. During the weekdays "Baby Face" is paired with "Night Nurse" and "Ladies They Talk About." "Baby Face" has gone down in history as one of the key movies that precipitated strict enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, that compendium of moralistic rules that required, for instance, that "no plot should present evil alluringly." Administered by the Hays Office, this document was merely winked at during the early years of sound film. The 1934 crackdown meant a farewell to lingerie scenes, anarchic comedy, and awe-inspiring vamps such as Stanwyck's Lily Powers in "Baby Face" (and Jean Harlow's Lil in "Red-Headed Woman," Mae West's Diamond Lil in "She Done Him Wrong," and of course Marlene Dietrich's Shanghai Lily in "Shanghai Express"). "Baby Face" was the pinnacle of pre-Code -- or the nadir, if considered from the finger-waggers' point of view. Warner Bros. head of production Darryl Zanuck brainstormed the amoral story himself, in an attempt to top MGM's giddily transgressive "Red-Headed Woman." In "Baby Face," a young steel town woman, pimped by her bootlegger father, escapes to New York City and shtups her way up the corporate ladder of the Gotham Trust Company. The tale's ending points towards redemption through love, but not awfully convincingly. As the gold digger, Zanuck cast Stanwyck, a Brooklyn-born orphan who had followed her older sister into a chorus line at age 15, appeared in her first movie at 19, and was married to hard-drinking vaudeville comic Frank Fay. The independently minded Stanwyck wasn't tied down to one studio, as were many of her peers. She worked concurrently at Columbia, where she starred in a series of Frank Capra pictures, and at Warners, a studio known for gritty dramas and comedies that acknowledged the tough times of the Depression. One hilarious piece of iconography in "Baby Face" is the treatment of Gotham Trust's skyscraper headquarters ("Boy, I'll bet there's plenty o' dough in this little shack," Lily marvels). As Lily King-Kongs it up the phallic shaped edifice -- by seducing and abandoning department heads -- the camera pans up a miniature model. Up she rises, from Personnel past Building & Loan to Accounting, and finally to the bank president's penthouse. By this time, Lily is dripping with jewels; when asked what she desires, she muses, "I'd like to have a Mrs. on my tombstone." But Zanuck's shocker never made it to theaters as intended. Various censorship entities demanded that cuts be made. "Baby Face" went under the knife, and some awkward reshoots were added (by this time, Stanwyck was working on another picture, and Zanuck had left the studio). Even with a tacked-on ending, in response to the Hays Office's demand for "morally compensating value," the movie was a shocker. Variety's critic wrote: "Any hotter than this for public showing would call for an asbestos audience blanket." The original "Baby Face" was thought to have been lost. Then, in 2004, Library of Congress archivist Michael Mashon noticed the difference in running times between the two copies the institution housed: the longer one was indeed the original cut. The new, archival print ends with a few examples of the sanitized scenes, for comparison's sake. "Baby Face" intact plays much smoother than the censored version. The sleaze factor is definitely upped during the scenes showing tough-cookie Lily among Dad's speakeasy clientele. Interestingly, a politician's leering gaze up Lily's comely body -- a shot previously cut -- prefigures Lily's vertical appropriation of the men of Gotham Trust. The most mind-blowing revelation is that the movie's spine had been removed -- and that that spine consisted of Lily's lessons in Nietzschean philosophy from the German cobbler who'd often stop by the speakeasy for beer. He exorts Lily to "use men to get the things you want ... You must be a master, not a slave." After she's established in New York, he sends her a Nietzsche volume with the passage "crush out all sentiment" marked. Ah-ha -- that explains Lily's intensely thoughtful reveries after every exchange with the cobbler. In the censored version, all mentions of the philosopher were excised, and Hays Office honcho Joseph Breen himself rewrote dialogue so that the cobbler said, "There is a right way and a wrong way. Remember, the price of the wrong way is too great." Puh-leez. Even in the censored version, Stanwyck's performance was scorching. Although the skinny kid wasn't a great beauty like Garbo or Dietrich, the force of her eye contact with her conquests (one is played by the young John Wayne) makes perfectly plausible that she turns them to jelly. In "Baby Face," men are pathetic dupes, and women are chumps if they don't become uber-seductresses. Lily's refusal to take it all seriously gives Stanwyck a chance to deliver some zingers with expert comic timing. In the 1933 "Ladies They Talk About," Stanwyck plays an incarcerated gun moll who tries to manipulate an evangelist into getting her out on parole. This women-behind-bars movie is great, naughty fun; its title refers not only to female crimminals, but also to (implied) lesbians. Released in 1931, "Night Nurse" opens with Stanwyck, a high school dropout, trying to talk her way into a training program in nursing, because "nursing people has always seemed second nature with me." By way of a cutesy twist, the underqualified Stanwyck is accepted. She's paired with fellow "probationer" Joan Blondell, a gum-chewing wisecracker who disparages their chosen profession. Stanwyck gently chides, "Oh, I'm sure in your heart, you love it." "Sez you," Blondell shoots back. "Yeah. Sez me in a big way, sister," replies Stanwyck with a smile. With those words, that smile, that sparkle in her eyes, Stanwyck's character pops into three dimensions: no goodie-two-shoes, she understands cynicism but rejects it. It's a disarming display of sincerity in an unpretentious little 72-minute black-and-white feature, and it floored me. And although Stanwyck doesn't play a bad girl in "Night Nurse," she gets involved in some down-and-dirty action while caring for a dissipated rich woman's neglected children. One of the bad guys is Clark Gable, just before he became a star; Stanwyck takes a punch from the big lug, but gets the better of him in the end. You better believe they don't make 'em like they used to. Catch three Barbara Stanwyck films at the Brattle through Thursday, April 13, 2006.
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