Baby Face

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. Twenty-five-year-old John Wayne appears briefly as one of Powers's lovers. 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. Mark A. Vieira, author of Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood has said, "Baby Face was certainly one of the top 10 films that caused the Production Code to be enforced." In 2005, Baby Face was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures to be added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Plot Lily Powers, an attractive young woman, works for her father, Nick, in a speakeasy in Erie, Pennsylvania, during Prohibition. Her father has been prostituting her to his customers since she was 14 years old. An influential politician threatens to have the speakeasy shut down after Lily refuses to have sex with him. Nick berates Lily for rejecting him. Lily then tells Nick she's moving out and that she'll hate him forever for forcing her to have sex with strangers. Minutes later Nick is killed in an explosion while repairing his burning still. After her father's funeral, Lily visits Cragg, an old cobbler and the only man she trusts. She tells him she was offered a job as a stripper at a local burlesque club. Cragg disapproves and encourages her to adopt Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy of exerting one's personal power over others to get what one wants. In Lily's case, that means using her sexuality to exploit men financially rather than allowing men to exploit her sexually.