Alfred E Green (1933)
I couldn’t have named a single picture directed by Alfred E Green although his filmography on IMDB includes some well-known titles, notably Dangerous (1935), for which Bette Davis won her first Oscar, and The Jolson Story (1946). Baby Face is fascinating as a piece of film history and a startling and entertaining movie to watch. As Mike Mashon, Head of the Moving Image Section of the US Library of Congress, explained in his introduction at BFI, the film opened in Los Angeles in early 1933 to decent reviews but was then rejected in its original form by the New York State Censorship Board. In order to revive Baby Face’s commercial prospects, Warner Bros had no option but to make changes: these included softening the impact of a female protagonist who uses her sex appeal for personal gain and reducing the script’s references to Nietzsche – I’m not sure whether because the aptly-surnamed Lilly Powers treats Will To Power and Thoughts Out of Season virtually as a practical guide to building her venal career or because the work of a God-is-dead European philosopher was regarded as noxious anyway. The uncensored version of Baby Face was lost until 2004, when it resurfaced in a Library of Congress vault.
While she’s working in a New York City-based bank, Lilly is known by some of her colleagues there as ‘baby face’. The sobriquet doesn’t fit Barbara Stanwyck, who plays Lilly. (It would have made more sense with Jean Harlow in the role and it’s worth noting that Baby Face was seen by some at the time as Warner Bros’s answer to the MGM hit of the previous year, Red Headed Woman, which has a basically similar plot and in which Harlow starred.) Even in the restored original version that BFI was screening, Lilly undergoes an eleventh-hour character change that makes her a better person – but the person created by Stanwyck and Alfred E Green in the preceding seventy minutes is much too convincing for this transformation to be emotionally believable. (In this respect, the Baby Face finale is similar to that of Dangerous.) Otherwise, though, the film’s description of the remorseless self-advancement of Lilly Powers is remarkably sustained. At the start, Lilly is suffocating in Erie, a Pennsylvania steel town, working in the speakeasy that her father (Robert Barrat) runs. The work involves not only serving drinks but, on her father’s instructions, sleeping with the men who patronise the place. There is one anomalous customer among the pawing, sweaty clientele – an elderly German-accented man called Adolf Cragg (Alphonse Ethier), a cobbler by trade but also a Nietzsche enthusiast. When a fire destroys the joint and kills her father, Lilly, unsure what to do next, is urged by Cragg to get away from Erie to the big city, and to use her looks – her potential to exploit men – to make something of herself. Lilly sets off for New York with Chico (Theresa Harris), an African-American girl who also worked in the speakeasy, became her friend and, once Lilly’s life begins to take off in New York, works as her maid for the remainder of the story.
When she leaves Erie, the first man Lilly gives her body to in order to get her own way is a young railroad worker (James Murray) who, when he discovered her and Chico in the freight train they’ve hidden in, had threatened to call the police and have the girls thrown in jail. Once she’s in New York, Lilly sets her sights on the skyscraper that houses the Gotham Trust bank. Lilly literally works her way up the organisation, thanks to intercourse with, successively: a personnel officer (Maynard Holmes); a colleague in the filing department (John Wayne – the John Wayne); the boss to whom this colleague recommends her (Douglas Dumbrille); a rising young executive called Ned Stevens (Donald Cook); and the bank’s first vice-president, J P Carter (Henry Kolker), who is also the father of Stevens’ fiancée (Margaret Lindsay). (The camera makes clear that the mortgage department is on the floor above the filing department, accounts on the floor above mortgages, and so on.) Alfred E Green’s telling of the story of Lilly’s ascent is both as hard-edged and as laconically witty as she is: it comprises strong performances from all concerned, plenty of funny one-liners (by Gene Markey) for Lilly, delivered by Barbara Stanwyck with crackerjack timing, and amusing costume changes to summarise her inexorable progress. This part of the film reaches its climax when the hopelessly-in-love Ned Stevens discovers that the man responsible for Lilly’s now luxurious lifestyle is his prospective father-in-law. Ned puts two bullets into Carter’s heart then one into his own, killing them both.
The bank love-nest scandal is hot news and Lilly’s photograph appears in the papers. The board of Gotham Trust, deciding they can regain confidence in the bank only by trading on the name of its respected founder, elect his playboy grandson Courtland Trenholm (George Brent) as bank president. Lilly’s interview with the board is a turning point – all the board members agree to pay her off, to prevent Lilly selling her story to the press, until the alert Courtland overrules them. Courtland accedes instead to her professed wish to disappear into anonymity. Lilly, if she is to retain credibility as a pitiable victim of circumstance, can hardly refuse his offer of a new identity and a job in Gotham’s Paris branch. By the time Courtland visits the Paris office, however, he finds that the resourceful ‘Miss Allen’, as she’s been renamed, is already head of the outfit’s travel bureau. Courtney himself now succumbs to Lilly’s attractions and they marry. The final part of Baby Face sees Courtland called back to New York to learn that the bank has failed and that he is to be indicted; he begs Lilly to sell the Cartier jewellery, and other gifts he’s showered on her, to finance his defence. She initially refuses but, as she’s about to set sail back to Paris, experiences her change of heart. In the meantime, Courtland tries but fails to commit suicide: the film ends with him in an ambulance on the way to hospital (and, it seems, recovery). His suddenly devoted and self-sacrificing wife is at his side.
Although this final retreat into conventionality is an anti-climax, the more complicated mood that develops from the point at which Lilly goes to work in Paris is built very skilfully. George Brent’s Courtland, although he falls for Lilly, does so with a greater self-awareness than the other men in the story; he also understands something, though by no means everything, of the woman she is. Barbara Stanwyck is tremendous from her first appearance in the speakeasy and she stays that way. Her mixture of deep jadedness and appetite for something else in the Erie sequences is compelling: there’s a fine moment when Lilly angrily tries to wipe the industrial grime of the place from the plants in a window box at her father’s joint; she retaliates against the various men trying it on with her, her father included – both physically and with sarcasm that’s as weary as it’s acerbic. Stanwyck also makes the bizarre Nietszche element almost persuasive: the advice that Adolf Cragg gives Lilly fuses with something that the actress has already suggested is inherent (but hitherto unconscious) in her. Once she’s in New York, Barbara Stanwyck gives the character a terrific heartless verve but the clarion truthfulness of her acting means that you never forget where Lilly started.
3 May 2014
