"Baby Face" is a 1933 American pre-Code drama film directed
by Alfred E. Green for Warner Bros., starring Barbara Stanwyck as Lily
Powers, and featuring George Brent. Based on a story by Darryl F. Zanuck (under the pseudonym Mark
Canfield), "Baby Face" portrays an attractive young woman
who uses sex to advance her social and financial status. Marketed with
the salacious tagline "She had it and made it pay," the
film's open discussion of sex made it one of the most notorious films
of the Pre-Code Hollywood era and helped bring the era to a close as
enforcement of the code became stricter beginning in 1934.
Aside from its depiction of a seductress, the film is notable for the
"comradely" relationship Lily has with African-American
Chico, who is her co-worker in Erie, Pennsylvania, and comes with her
to New York City. She later becomes Stanwyck's maid, but their
relationship remains friendly, and not that of a mistress and her
servant. When Lily's father tries to fire Chico, Lily tells him that
if Chico goes, she goes.
Stanwyck had influence on the film's script. It was her suggestion
that Lily had been forced by her father to have sex with the customers
of his speakeasy.
Twenty-five-year-old John Wayne appears briefly as one of Powers's
lovers (below).
In 2004, when Michael Mashon, a curator of the motion picture division
at the Library of Congress, received a request for a print of this
film, he discovered two negatives of the film: the original camera
negative and a "duplicate negative" that was longer. The
duplicate negative was the pre-release (uncensored) version of the
film that was submitted to the New York State censorship board in 1933
for approval. The uncensored version received its public premiere at the London Film
Festival in November 2004, more than 70 years after it was made. The
existence of these negatives allows pristine quality prints to be made
as compared to other surviving films of that era.
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Baby Face from 1933