Baby Face

SIN! SEX! SHOCK! SCANDAL! Welcome to the sordid cinema of Pre-Code Hollywood! Classic film scholar Michael van den Bos is your tour guide on a 5-part trek through the seamier, steamier and sinister side of Hollywood movies from the early 1930s.

This Film Studies series delves into the outrageous and salacious movies created by Hollywood in a time known as the Pre-Code era. These films were produced from 1930 – 1934, a period when studios pushed the boundaries of indecent and intense adult themes deemed objectionable and offensive by American morality organizations before Hollywood’s Production Code Office strictly enforced its previously ignored censorship rules. Get ready for deliriously debauched delights on a Babylonian scale!

Our Pre-Code tour begins with a notorious film that helped trigger the end of this wildly wicked era… Baby Face (1933). Barbara Stanwyck plays Lily Powers, a damaged young woman who regains control of her life by taking sexual advantage of the executives working in an international bank, sleeping her way up the corporate ladder, leaving behind a trail of broken men (including a very young John Wayne).

In his pre-screening talk, Michael touches on the sexually-charged nature of the story, the film’s streamlined and propulsive filmmaking and discusses the remarkable performance by Barbara Stanwyck, one of Pre-code Hollywood’s most daring actresses.

If you want to turn someone onto pre-censorship movies at their most fun, sleazy and outrageous, just take them to Baby Face and from there they’ll be inspired to explore the whole era.

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

Inarguably one of the greatest screen actresses of the century, Stanwyck gives one of her strongest performances here, all fire and hunger and pain.

Jeffery Anderson, Combustile Celluloid

Still breathlessly subversive today.

Sheila O’Malley