Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on April 10, 2006 at 10:39:34

Uncut version of 'Baby Face' is naughty but nice

By Ty Burr, Boston Globe Staff | April 7, 2006

Forget ''Basic Instinct 2" and other melodramas of wheezy modern kink. The most dangerous woman on Boston-area movie screens this week is Barbara Stanwyck, and the film she's in is 73 years old.

''Baby Face," in which Stanwyck's Lily Powers literally shtups her way up the executive ladder floor by floor, was such a shocker in 1933 that the New York State Board of Censors rejected it outright, forcing Warner Bros. to make extensive cuts and reshoots before the film could be released. That bowdlerized version was the only available print for decades, and it's still punchy enough to sear a viewer's eyeballs.

The original cut, discovered in the vaults of the Library of Congress in 2004 and showing at the Brattle starting today, is even more caustically amoral, and it's something else besides: a fascinatingly conflicted artifact of Depression-era do-me feminism. Lily Powers is one of the screen's great bad girls, and ''Baby Face" can't decide whether to celebrate her or string her up.

The film begins in classic Stanwyck working-girl territory: the back streets and gin mills of Erie, Pa., where Lily's sleazebucket father (Robert Barrat) runs a speakeasy that caters to the local steelworkers and where the heroine is known as ''the sweetheart of the night shift." Lily's already a hard case, and when dad tries to sell her favors to a local politician, she bolts for New York City, following the advice of a fire-breathing immigrant cobbler (Alphonse Ethier) who urges her to read Nietzsche and cultivate her will to power. ''Exploit yourself!," he exhorts her. ''Be strong! Use men to get the things you want!"

Bonus points if you guessed this scene didn't make the cut in the reedited version.

• http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2006/04/07/uncut_version_of_baby_face_is_naughty_but_nice/   (Open in New Window)