The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 16-22
Baby Face (1933)
Directed by Alfred E. Green
One of the classics of Hollywood’s pre-Code era—when mainstream entertainments were allowed to be as proudly raunchy as any filmmaker could get away with—Baby Face remains as startlingly racy as ever. Don’t mistake “racy” in this case for “fun,” however. Green’s chronicle of prostitute Lily Powers’s (Barbara Stanwyck) sex-oriented rise through the professional and personal ranks is, in fact, a bitingly cynical affair, empowering to women only insofar as it exposes the objectifying attitudes of most of the men she seduces on her way to the top. Her own history of being pimped out by her own father (Robert Barrat) and thus being exposed to men’s basest desires provides the psychological backdrop for her no-holds-barred quest; Nietzsche’s Will to Power offers the philosophical fuel, at least as explained to her by Lily’s friend Cragg (Alphonse Ethier). Even if her last-minute good-girl conversion at the hands of Trenholm (George Brent), the only man who sees through her, isn’t wholly convincing, there remains in Stanwyck’s vociferous performance an aura of mystery around the unspoken motives of this great manipulator. Kenji Fujishima (March 19, 2:20pm, 5:45pm, 9:50pm at Film Forum’s “It Girls, Flappers, Jazz Babies and Vamps”)