Out In The 1930s Jazzy Be-Bop Night-A Girl Has Got To Do What a Girl Has To Do-“Baby Face”- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the 1930s forbidden film classic, Baby Face.

Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck, written by Darryl Zanuck, 1933


A girl has got to do what a girl has to do, circa 1933. That is the overarching theme of the film under review, Baby Face. And what a down in the dregs speakeasy life, pimped off on by a money-grubbing Prohibition father girl does then, and now for that matter, is the best she can. And the best she can is to use her sexual attractiveness, her feminine wiles, and her gold-digger’s heart to move up the social ladder. The film traces Baby Face’s (played by a young and fetching, fetching more before she gets her hair all marcelled, Barbara Stanwyck) hard grind up the social scale using those talents. Starting from an “easy rider” on a tramp train up to the high and rarified airs of the CEO of a bank she single-mindedly get what she wants, or what she thinks she wants.

Now this story of a girl doing the best she can is hardly a new one but what makes this film stand out is its rather explicit and upfront look at social reality and sexual themes. No question Baby Face is a kept woman, no question she will exchange her sexual favors for money, jewels, and maybe power, power over upscale men. These themes usually in the past have been kept under veil and this film, or rather films if you watch the two versions provided, is a no holds barred affair in the scramble to get out from under. The other version is a more sanitized offering, more up to Hollywood 1930s code.

The companion films would make for a good cinema student’s class project. Moreover, the underlining “philosophy” presented is rather startling for a “fluff” movie as Baby Face is early on exposed to a nutty professor-type (really a shoemaker and maybe no so nutty), a foreign nutty guy, who is touting the virtues of Nietzsche’ Will To Power and his various war of all against all notions. That in 1933 (as Hitler starts kicking some Nietzsche doors down in troubled Germany). So all this socially significant material in an hour and one half film. Whee!