Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933)

Theresa Harris and Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Donald Cook, Alphonse Ethier, Henry Kolker, Theresa Harris, Margaret Lindsay, Arthur Hohl, John Wayne, Robert Barrat, Douglass Dumbrille. Screenplay: Gene Markey, Kathryn Scola, Darryl F. Zanuck. Cinematography: James Van Trees. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Howard Bretherton.

Baby Face has a reputation as the raunchy film that helped bring about the stifling Production Code in 1934, the year after it was released. But even in its original version -- for years only the expurgated film could be seen -- it doesn't exhibit much that would bring a blush to today's maiden cheeks. To be sure, its heroine, Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck), sleeps around in her determination to get somewhere, which in her case is marriage to a bank president. But this moral deviance, the film suggests, is the result of having been pimped out by her bootlegger father from the age of 14. So when he's blown up by the explosion of one of his stills, what else can she do but head for the big city and try to better herself? She has, after all, only the guidance of a middle-aged German, a customer of her father's speakeasy, who quotes Nietzsche at her. Her will to power involves the only capital she has: her body. So she sleeps her way up the flowchart of a New York bank until she's the kept woman of a vice-president, and when that ends in his being murdered by an ex-lover who also commits suicide in what the newspapers call a "love nest," she gets paid off -- to prevent her selling her diary to the newspapers -- with a job at the bank's Paris branch. And then she goes straight, fending off the attentions of various men, and making a success of the bank's travel bureau division. It can't end there, however, because when the bank's young president, Courtland Trenholme (George Brent), comes to Paris on a visit, they fall in love and get married, causing a scandal that leads to the bank's closing and Trenholme's indictment for some kind of corporate malfeasance. When he asks Lily to help him out financially -- she has accumulated half a million dollars in gifts from him, and presumably from her former lover -- she refuses, reverting to the ruthless, hard-edged Lily. But just as she's about to leave him she has a change of heart, only to find that the desperate Trenholme has tried to commit suicide. He's not mortally wounded, however, and in the ambulance on the way to the hospital she confesses that she really loves him and he gazes gratefully at her. Fade out. Censors in states like New York bridled at the apparent rewarding of sin and forced Warner Bros. to cut some of the more scandalous scenes and to change the ending so that Lily does penance by returning to her old home town to live a chastened life. But even in its long-lost uncensored version, there's something a little off about Baby Face, a feeling that it wants to be more than just a story about sex and upward mobility. The men in the film, including the young John Wayne, are an unmemorable series of himbos and sugar daddies, easy pushovers for the likes of an ambitious and unscrupulous young woman. The last-minute change of heart and the squishy happy ending feel unearned. What coherence the film has comes not from the script but from Barbara Stanwyck's performance, from her tough likability.

A Successful Calamity (John G. Adolfi, 1932)

A Successful Calamity (John G. Adolfi, 1932)

Cast: George Arliss, Mary Astor, Evalyn Knapp, Grant Mitchell, Hardie Albright, William Janney, David Torrance, Randolph Scott, Fortunio Bonanova. Screenplay: Maude T. Howell, Julien Josephson, Austin Parker, based on a play by Claire Kummer. Cinematography: James Van Trees. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Howard Bretherton. Music: Bernhard Kaun.

Hollywood's most memorable reactions to the Great Depression tended to be ironic: Ginger Rogers singing "We're in the Money" ("We never see a headline about breadlines today") in 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933) or nitwit socialites scavenger hunting in homeless camps for a "forgotten man" in My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936). But A Successful Calamity takes a different approach, almost an endorsement of Republican optimism about the economy, to the crisis. The movie opens with a scene in the office of the unnamed POTUS, who in 1932 would have been Herbert Hoover. (Although we don't see the president's face, the actor playing him, Oscar Apfel, wears Hoover's familiar high, stiff collar.) The president is welcoming financier Henry Wilton (George Arliss) back to the States after a year helping negotiate a deal about war debts. Wilton has yet to return to his home, where he expects to be warmly greeted by his wife, daughter, and son. Instead, he is met at the train station by his valet, Connors (Grant Mitchell), who explains that Mrs. Wilton (Mary Astor) is holding a "musicale" because she hadn't expected him until tomorrow, that his daughter, Peggy (Evalyn Knapp), is probably with her fiancé and couldn't have come to meet him because her car has been impounded after too many accidents and traffic tickets, and that his son, Eddie (William Janney), is playing in an important polo match. When Wilton discovers that his family is too busy socializing even to have dinner with him, he asks the valet if poor people have similar problems. No, Connors replies, poor people don't have enough money to "go" all the time. So Wilton gets the bright idea of telling his family that he's "ruined," whereupon they flock around him in support, vowing to get jobs or otherwise find ways to make ends meet. And when word leaks out that Wilton is on the skids, the news somehow enables him to make a killing on a stock purchase he's been angling for unsuccessfully. The moral seems to be that poor people really do have it better. It's an inane premise executed with modest finesse by a director known for his collaboration with Arliss on half a dozen other films, most notably Alexander Hamilton (1931), The Man Who Played God (1932), and Voltaire (1933). Arliss, one of the more unlikely stars of the early talkies, is an odd match for Astor, 38 years his junior. She plays Wilton's second wife -- the grown children are presumably from his first marriage -- but there's not much conviction or chemistry in their relationship.

Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924)

Mary Astor and John Barrymore in Beau Brummel

George Bryan "Beau" Brummel: John Barrymore
Lady Margery Alvanley: Mary Astor
The Prince of Wales: Willard Louis
Lady Hester Stanhope: Carmel Myers
Duchess of York: Irene Rich
Mortimer: Alec B. Francis
Lord Alvanley: William Humphrey
Lord Stanhope: Richard Tucker
Lord Byron: George Beranger

Director: Harry Beaumont
Screenplay: Dorothy Farnum
Based on a play by Clyde Fitch
Cinematography: David Abel
Film editing: Howard Bretherton

The slow, stagy, and occasionally cheesy-looking costume drama was the film that lured John Barrymore away from Broadway to Hollywood. It's about the rise and fall of George Bryan Brummel (usually spelled with two l's) in the court of the Prince of Wales, later Prince Regent and then George IV. Barrymore gets to load on the old age makeup -- which makes him look startlingly like his brother, Lionel -- as the film goes on. The supporting cast plays a gaggle of semihistorical figures who are mostly there for atmosphere; I was surprised, for example, to discover that the rather ordinary fellow limping around in the background was supposed to be Lord Byron. None of the film's history can be trusted, of course, so there's really not much to be said about it other than that Barrymore chews the scenery with aplomb and that the 18-year-old Mary Astor is pleasant to look at.