Baby Face

Lily Powers grows up in her father's speakeasy in Pennsylvania, where he sells access to her. When he dies she goes to New York and climbs a bank from the ground floor up, using a man on each floor. The film does not do this by metaphor. It shows you the floors. Alfred E. Green directs. Barbara Stanwyck plays Lily, and a young John Wayne turns up in the cast. The strangest figure in it is Cragg, the cobbler who advises her. He tells her to read Nietzsche, to use power, and never to let anyone own her. Quoting Nietzsche outright in a 1933 Hollywood picture was not ordinary. The New York censor board rejected the film before release. Warner Bros. reshot scenes, softened Cragg's speech and pinned a moral correction onto the ending. The uncensored version was presumed lost until a print surfaced in the Library of Congress archive in 2004. This is one of the films regularly named as a reason the Production Code began to be enforced in earnest in 1934. Who it is for: anyone curious about pre Code Hollywood and about Stanwyck. Who it is not for: the moral ending glued on at the close contradicts the film's own logic, and reads as simply odd if you do not know there are two versions.