Baby Face is a 1933 American pre-Code drama film directed by Alfred E. Green for Warner Bros., starring Barbara Stanwyck as Lily Powers, and featuring George Brent.

Based on a story by Darryl F. Zanuck (under the pseudonym Mark Canfield), Baby Face portrays a young woman who uses sex to advance her social and financial status.

Mark A. Vieira, author of Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood [5] has said, "Baby Face was certainly one of the top 10 films that caused the Production Code to be enforced.

"[6] In 2005, Baby Face was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures to be added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

[7][8] Lily Powers, a young woman, works for her father, Nick, in a speakeasy in Erie, Pennsylvania, during Prohibition.

Courtland Trenholm, the grandson of Gotham Trust's founder and a playboy, is elected bank president to handle the resulting scandal.

The board of directors learns that Lily agreed to sell her diary to the press for $10,000 which includes the stories of her multiple office affairs.

The Great Depression was having a devastating effect on the film industry at the time, and many studio personnel were voluntarily taking salary cuts to help.

Aside from its depiction of a seductress, the film is notable for the "comradely" relationship Lily has with African-American Chico,[10] who is her co-worker in Erie, Pennsylvania, and comes with her to New York City.

[1] A publicity still from this film aptly shows Barbara Stanwyck posing next to a stepladder,[11] representing Lily's step-by-step up the ladder of success, as she seduces one man after another.

An instrumental version of the 1926 hit song "Baby Face", composed by Harry Akst, is played over the opening credits and in later scenes.

However, the soundtrack is dominated by an instrumental version of "Saint Louis Blues" by W. C. Handy, particularly when Lily is working on her latest victim.

Louis Blues” in character as “Chico" throughout the film, and a triumphant brass finish plays at the close of the final scene.

Ralph Erwin's “I Kiss Your Hand Madame”, from the 1929 film of the same name, serves as the theme for the romance between Lily and Trenholm.

After its initial limited release, the Hays Office recommended that the film be pulled from distribution entirely because of multiple violations of the Production Code.

[1] Also, Lily's status as a "kept woman" was made less obvious, and the scene where she seduces a railroad worker in a boxcar, while her friend Chico is on the other side of the car, singing "Saint Louis Blues", was cut.

[1][9] Another significant change was that the cobbler's enthusiasm for Nietzschean philosophy was replaced by his becoming the moral voice of the film, showing that Lily had been wrong to use her body to succeed.

[5] The New York State Censorship Board rejected the film's original version in April 1933, and Warners made the changes described above, as well as cutting some sexually suggestive shots.

[1] The uncensored version remained lost until 2004, when it resurfaced at a Library of Congress film vault in Dayton, Ohio.

In 2005, it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected for preservation in the United States Library of Congress National Film Registry[8] and also was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 best movies of the last 80 years.

Mordaunt Hall in The New York Times panned the film, calling it "an unsavory subject, with incidents set forth in an inexpert fashion,"[14] while a review in The New York Evening Post said "You cannot escape the belief that Lily is a vixen of the lowest order and that the men who play with her are doomed to perish in the flames.

"[9] Modern reviews are more appreciative: Ty Burr of The Boston Globe called it "a fascinatingly conflicted artifact of Depression-era do-me feminism.

Lily Powers is one of the screen's great hard girls, and "Baby Face" can't decide whether to celebrate her or string her along.