Baby Face

Baby Face  (Alfred Green, 1933) The movie Baby Face is notorious for a bunch of reasons. It is "Pre-Code," that period of film-making between the introduction of sound (in 1927) and 1934 (the introduction of Shirley Temple) where Hollywood was aggressively flirting with more mature subject matter, to the point where religious groups particularly the Catholic Legion of Decency started fingering their beads in worry. Horror films became more explicit, gangster films started to rise in popularity with the one-two punch of The Great Depression and the Prohibition Era, and branched off to a sequel genre, the prison film.

And then there was sex. That subject crossed all genres. Even if the film was a cautionary tale about loose behavior you couldn't actually SHOW that loose behavior lest it then influence the behavior you're being warned about. It's the cinematic equivalent of restricting your sex education class to the subject of "abstinence."

As is usually the case with these things, "The Code" was a way to tamp down permissive, or even progressive, behavior in the movies—producers were persuaded to follow a path that was straight and narrow-minded, and so there was watchfulness for subversive behavior, political discontent, and overt sexuality. Somehow, the Marx brothers got past all that.

But, Baby Face didn't. Like a lot of pre-code films, once the Hays Office had their way, the most objectionable bits were excised like a ruptured appendix. The lucky ones were re-distributed with the shorter running times. The unlucky ones were simply re-made, sometimes scant months after the release of the original, and, with any luck, the original wasn't "filed" in the Hudson River, where in the more permissive 1980's, they started to crop up in home video releases. Baby Face was found at the Library of Congress, a "dupe negative" had survived uncut and it was first screened in 2004. 

What they saw was Barbara Stanwyck starring as Lily Powers, a waitress/bartender at the speakeasy of her corrupt father (Robert Barrat). Lily has grown up tough, not for the least reason is that dear old dad had been using her as a chief draw to keep his business going, throwing men her way since she was 14. She's contemptuous of men, and why not? The dregs of society come through her father's door and she treats their low expectations of her with a biting sarcasm that only makes them weaker. "All the kindness and gentleness in me has been killed," she says at one point. And it's been a death of a thousand cuts, every grope, every grab, every compromise. She's trapped with no way out.

But, there is one door, and one day, a potential mentor walks through it—Cragg (Alphonse Ethier), a cobbler, with a bent toward philosophy, manages to break through her hard exterior with a book he insists she reads, written by Nietzsche. He tells her that she already has the weapons and the drive ("her potentialities") to get ahead in the world.

"A woman, young, beautiful, like you, can get anything she wants in the world. Because you have Power over men! But you must use men! Not let them use you. You must be a master! Not a slave. Look, here, Nietzsche says, "All life, no matter how we idealize it, is nothing more nor less than exploitation." That's what I'm telling you! Exploit yourself! Go to some big city where you will find opportunities. Use men! Be strong! Defiant! Use men! To get the things you want."

And so she does. She kicks the sawdust of the speakeasy off her shoes and leaves the night-crawlers behind, moving to the big city and sets aim on conquering the world of commerce, finagling her way (if one can use the term) into getting a job in the secretarial pool and sleeping, and blackmailing her way up the chain of command (Interesting to see John Wayne show up as one of her early disposable conquests—it's the only time these two power-houses worked together in their careers, and, of course, Stanwyck walks all over him, so early in his career).

Set to the songs "St. Louis Blues" and the newly popularized hit "Baby Face," Baby Face deconstructs the pot-boiler to bare essentials, under-pinning it with a philosophical base (Hitler was coming to power at the time, using the same sort of philosophy) and the screen-writers (from a story by one Mark Canfield) are street-smart and uncompromising in how Lily plays the middle-management suck-up's until she finally bags the big prize—the wealthy scion (George Brent) of the bank's founder.

If there's anything wrong with Baby Face, it might be that the writers are a little too fond of the double entendre's they spew out, accompanied by a punctuating eye-roll. They and the director go to that well a few too many times (to the point where my eyes started to instinctively roll), but there are so many surprises, so many chances being taken, that you give the movie a lot of latitude in taking things so far. And Stanwyck is always a joy to watch, even this early in her career. She is one of the great (great!) screen actors to come out of the pre-code era and she had the ability to grow and mature beyong just holding the attention of the camera.

Oh. And Mark Canfield, who wrote the story? He sold the treatment to Warner Brothers for a single dollar. Then skipped the studio to make a name for himself over at 20th Century Fox. His real name, by the way, was Darryl F. Zanuck.

The Whole Town's Talking

The Whole Town's Talking (John Ford, 1935) Director John Ford never made an outright screwball comedy (not even his service comedies, but one could make a case for the inadvertent Tobacco Road), but he comes close with this Columbia studio gangster version of "The Prince and the Pauper" (based on a story by W.R. Burnett, who wrote "Little Caesar" and did dialogue work on Scarface)

Bookish ad drone Arthur Ferguson Jones (Edward G. Robinson) lives by The Book—never late for work, always does his job, never stands out. But he oversleeps one morning and events start to cascade. He gets in late to the office, is arbitrarily chosen to be fired to be "made an example of," and when he's on the street, he's arrested for bearing a startling resemblance to "Killer" Mannion (Robinson again) a notorious racketeer. Jones becomes a sensation, with reporters clamoring for interviews, and police and politicians making political hay out of the arrest.

Only one trouble—they have the wrong man. When "the real" Mannion is arrested at the same time Jones is in jail, the police realize their mistake, but before setting Jones free, they give him a letter, explaining to any official who he really is, despite the resemblance, so no further misunderstandings can happen.

Jones' world turns upside down—he becomes a sensation, attracting the attention of the wise-cracking Wilhelmina "Bill" Clark (Jean Arthur), as well as the town newspaper, which begins exploiting Jones' bizarre story for headlines.

Then, things get complicated, story-wise and technically. Mannion escapes from jail and is waiting for Jones when he gets home from work. Ford stages it as if it's going to be the standard actor/stand-in substitution, even employing some "Kirk-lighting" to keep the gangster-actor's identity under wraps. Then, begins some of the most intricate split-screen work seen before or since. Robinson is a consummate professional and never slips characterization and he's always looking himself in the eye when he talks. Ford shoots long takes of dialogue between the two Robinson characters and there's nary a hesitation.

This movie was made in 1935, a mere eight years after The Jazz Singer ushered in sound. Yet this double-performance tricks border on the magical. In the shot above, Jones (on the left) will hand the newspaper—with its incriminating headlines to Mannion (on the right). The hand-off will occur behind the lamp—a pretty simple feint. How, then, do you explain Jones handing his letter of identity to Mannion (so that he can carry out his crimes undisturbed by the police) in full frame with no lamp or other stick of furniture as camouflage? How do you explain the dialogue scenes between Jones and Mannion where the latter is smoking a cigar and the smoke enters Jones' field of vicinity? How do you explain the mirror shot of Robinson's Jones seeing Robinson's Mannion behind him in reflection (reflected rear-projection?)?

Ford was a director of telling details, but the intricacies of these special effects shots are something above and beyond the typical character moments that Ford was becoming famous for. These little acts of magic were designed to sell the double act to an audience already on the look-out for tell-tale signs of discontinuity and trickery. Ford was already a master of the frame and of visual story-telling from years of directing during the silent era. But his co-conspiracy with Robinson (they would not work together again until Cheyenne Autumn in 1964) to create two distinctive personalities is one of their great little tricks on the audience, making this minor film (for both) something of a triumphant challenge.

Which Mannion is it?