The Adventuress as Anti-Hero in Baby Face (1933)
Despite the sweetness of its title, Baby Face (1933) packs a punch so spicy that it’s famous even among Pre-Code pictures for its frankness about transactional sexual relationships. The pre-release version of the movie caused a ruckus with the censors that Warner Bros. tried to appease with a new ending, several minutes of editing, and some altered dialogue, but we’re lucky to have the rediscovered original cut, which is definitely the one to see if you have access to both versions. It’s a powerhouse performance by Barbara Stanwyck as the grimly determined Lily Powers, a young woman who chooses to exploit her sexuality for her own social and financial gain, but the film’s attitude toward its protagonist is complex, neither whole-heartedly endorsing nor condemning her actions. As an example of the adventuress, Lily exhibits the amorality and materialism one might associate with a villain, but instead she functions more as an anti-hero whose refusal to play by the rules makes sense when the game is so outrageously rigged against her.
Raised in a shabby speakeasy and prostituted by her father (Robert Barrat) from the age of 14, Lily spends her nights fending off the advances of drunken customers. She and her friend, Chico (Theresa Harris), run away to New York City to seek their fortune, where Lily takes the advice of her philosophical mentor, Mr. Cragg (Alphonse Ethier), to use men in order to get wealth and opportunity for herself. She starts in the employment office at a large bank, where she works her way through a series of lovers who can provide better jobs, clothes, and apartments until she becomes embroiled in a scandal that forces her to relocate to Paris, where her apparent reformation attracts the admiration of the new bank president, Courtland Trenholm (George Brent). Unfortunately for Courtland, his tenure at the bank coincides with disastrous mismanagement, which tests Lily’s ability to value love over her own financial security.
The censors might have clutched their Bibles over the brazen behavior of such a Jezebel, and in a different movie – say, The Women (1939) – a character like Lily might be branded an evil adventuress and destined for rejection, scorn, and punishment. The term “adventuress” dates from the 18th century and refers to a woman who advances herself through unscrupulous (i.e. sexual) means. While a male “adventurer” is seen as a brave explorer, even if he seeks wealth and reputation for his own gain, a female “adventuress” defies patriarchal gender norms with her ambition, interest in wealth and or power, and her willingness to trade sexual favors in order to attain them. Lily is very much a classic adventuress in many respects. She makes remarkable speed through her lovers, encouraging and then discarding at least five that we see before she meets Courtland, which puts her well beyond many of her cinematic sisters and into the literary territory of infamous 18th-century examples like Moll Flanders (1722), Roxana (1724), and Fanny Hill (1748), all of whom rattled the censorious moralists of their day, too. Lily even causes a murder-suicide when one of her former lovers can’t accept his dismissal, which only seems to bother her because it requires her to navigate the subsequent scandal. Her last-minute reformation in either version of the ending can’t undo her earlier actions, and both versions seem to let her off easy by taking her money but leaving her with less tangible rewards intact.
Those endings make more sense if we think about Lily’s role as more anti-hero than villain. The most famous example of the adventuress as anti-hero is Becky Sharp in William Makepeace Thackeray’s 19th-century novel, Vanity Fair, which is pointedly subtitled A Novel without a Hero. Lily is no hero, either, and she has many characteristics in common with Becky, but Lily ultimately comes across as a more sympathetic figure. From the beginning, we understand that Lily has been born into a hard life without opportunities or parental protection, and there is really no question of her trying to make the best of her nightmarish situation after her own father prostitutes her to his customers. Becky shows only the rarest flashes of kindness toward her supposed friend, Amelia, but Lily demonstrates early and constant friendship for Chico, even though the pair adopt the roles of mistress and maid in New York. Lily might be called a homewrecker for her affairs with married and engaged men, but she never seduces any man who isn’t eager to accept her offer, even as they imagine her to be more virtuous and innocent than she really is. Lily’s lovers don’t seem concerned that they are cheating on their wives and possibly ruining the reputation of a young woman, so it’s impossible to see them as innocent victims. The scene in which Lily faces the bank board after the murder-suicide accurately depicts the world she inhabits, where cabals of old white men have all the power. We can’t blame Lily for trying to play them in order to get a tiny portion of their wealth for herself, and Courtland doesn’t seem to blame her, either, even though it’s his job to prevent her from fleecing the bank. Lily and Courtland fall for each other, although Courtland knows about her past, mainly because they’re both players, and it’s Lily who introduces the idea of marriage as opposed to a prolonged affair. Lily’s final reformation in the pre-release cut might seem sudden, but we know that Courtland has been different from the other men in her life from their very first meeting, so if any man is going to be worth more to her than her money it has to be him. The ambiguity of the pre-release ending lets us imagine what ultimately happens to the couple instead of insisting on a specific outcome, so Lily and Courtland can have whatever ending the viewer thinks they deserve.
Sadly, the arrival of heavy-handed Code enforcement in 1934 would make stories like Baby Face harder to find in the ensuing decades, but plenty of other Pre-Code movies offer great examples. See Jean Harlow in Red-Headed Woman (1932) and Mae West in She Done Him Wrong (1933) for more of Pre-Code’s sexually transgressive adventuresses. For more of Barbara Stanwyck’s early roles, see Night Nurse (1931), Shopworn (1932), and Ladies They Talk About (1933). Stanwyck went on to earn Best Actress Oscar nominations for Stella Dallas (1937), Ball of Fire (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), and Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), but she never won. For more of the great but often uncredited Theresa Harris, try Hold Your Man (1933), The Flame of New Orleans (1941), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943).
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— Jennifer Garlen for Classic Movie Hub
Jennifer Garlen pens our monthly Silver Screen Standards column. You can read all of Jennifer’s Silver Screen Standards articles here.
Jennifer is a former college professor with a PhD in English Literature and a lifelong obsession with film. She writes about classic movies at her blog, Virtual Virago, and presents classic film programs for lifetime learning groups and retirement communities. She’s the author of Beyond Casablanca: 100 Classic Movies Worth Watching and its sequel, Beyond Casablanca II: 101 Classic Movies Worth Watching, and she is also the co-editor of two books about the works of Jim Henson.
