The real-life effects of the Great Depression were frequently replicated in pre-Code Hollywood films. One such film is Baby Face. Barbara Stanwyck plays a young woman who has been virtually prostituted out by her father. She eventually gains independence, but she still relies on her sexuality to survive.
Baby Face is a pre-Code drama film directed by Alfred E. Green for Warner Bros. in 1933. It stars Barbara Stanwyck as Lily Powers and George Brent. Baby Face is based on a novella by Darryl F. Zanuck (aka Mark Canfield) about a beautiful young woman who exploits sex to increase her social and financial standing. John Wayne, who is twenty-five years old, plays one of Powers’ lovers.
The film’s explicit discussion of sex made it one of the most controversial films of the Pre-Code Hollywood era, and it helped bring the era to a conclusion as enforcement of the code grew harsher beginning in 1934, with the lurid tagline ‘She had it and made it pay.’
‘Baby Face was undoubtedly one of the top 10 pictures that drove the Production Code to be implemented,’ according to Mark A. Vieira, author of Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood. In 2005, Baby Face was chosen as part of the Library of Congress’s yearly selection of 25 motion movies to be added to the National Film Registry.
This picture was Warner Bros.’ response to MGM’s Red-Headed Woman (1932), a pre-Code Hollywood film starring Jean Harlow and with a similar concept. Darryl F. Zanuck, the production’s leader, wrote the film’s concept and sold it to Warner Bros. for a dollar. According to Warner Bros., the film grossed $308,000 in the United States and $144,000 internationally.
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