TCM Archives - Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 1 (Waterloo Bridge [1931] / Baby Face / Red-Headed Woman) starring Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Donald Cook, Alphonse Ethier, Henry Kolker
What's Most Shocking Is What Isn't Shown
Here are three films that couldnt and wouldnt have been made at any other time. Contrary to popular belief, the history of Hollywood permissiveness, what filmmakers could get away with on screen, is not a steadily rising graph from puritanical early days to the party-hearty present. In the early 1930s, a national mood of shock over the stock market crash and impatience with Prohibition licensed a relaxation of the movie industrys self-censorship policies. Sexuality--always a driving force in movie plots
and characterizations, even when repressed--became a more explicit presence, with costuming that sometimes pushed the envelope for exposure of epidermis and dialogue that could be shockingly blunt. Baby Face (1933) was made at Warner Bros., the golden-age studio with the grittiest style and the most street cred. The gutsy Barbara Stanwyck stars as a young woman from a factory town who hops a boxcar to the big city and sleeps her way to the top--a progress famously indexed by a camera ascending floor by floor outside a Gotham office building as she trades up, one corporate suitor after another. No other major-studio film was more explicit about sex as a tool and a commodity, yetBaby Face is curiously less sexy than any number of movies that werent so outspoken about it. This TCM collection features both the theatrical-release version familiar for decades and a recently rediscovered preview version that is markedly superior, runs five minutes longer, and includes more sexual liaisons. It also happily lacks an absurd final scene that got tacked onto the release version to explain how the heroine learned to be content with a modest lifestyle. Red-Headed Woman (1932) is arguably the raunchiest movie Jean Harlow made at MGM (though not as raunchy as her scenes in Howard Hughes 1930 Hells Angels). Unlike Stanwyck in Baby Face--a proletarian heroine grimly selling herself to beat capitalism and the patriarchy at their own game--Harlows character brazenly relishes both the sex and the posh life it wins for her. The lions share of this sardonic comedy, scripted by Anita Loos and an uncredited F. Scott Fitzgerald, focuses on Harlows seduction of her married boss (Chester Morris) and the havoc she wreaks in his upper-crust world. Charles Boyer has a role (his first Hollywood credit) as a French chauffeur who knows how to give satisfaction, and the films air of breezy ribaldry even allows the star a casual flash of bare breast. The rarest item in the collection, the 1931 Universal version of Waterloo Bridge, has long been unseen because MGM bought the film in order to do a 1940 remake (starring Vivien Leigh) and locked the original away in the vault. Directed by James Whale the same year he did Frankenstein (1931), the picture charts the romance of a chorus-girl-turned-streetwalker (Mae Clarke) and a well-born young soldier (Kent Douglass) on brief furlough from the trenches during WWI. Apart from a zesty prelude in a London music hall and two scenes on the titular bridge, the film remains yoked to its talky theatrical source, a Robert E. Sherwood play flogging the hoary conceit that no fallen woman, however pure of heart, could be permitted to marry into a good family. Unlike the Hays Code-compliant remake, the film leaves no doubt how the heroine makes her living. --Richard T. Jameson
Personal Review: TCM Archives - Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 1 (Waterloo Bridge [1931] / Baby Face / RedHeaded Woman) starring Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Donald Cook, Alphonse Ethier, Henry Kolker
These Pre-Code films are being touted for the frankness of the subject matter. What I found interesting is despite the supposedly sordid material on display it seems that the makers were censoring themselves and only alluding to the most base behavior demonstrated by the films' "heroines".
For the most prurient among us there is no nudity or wanton displays of carnal knowledge. As far as I'm concerned that's alright because in this age of anything goes some of our auteur's could use a little self-policing. The best of the bunch is "Baby Face" where Barbara Stanwyck plays a down-and-outer who has been mistreated by men her whole life. Directed to Nietzchean philosophy by a professorial type she learns how to exploit her feminine wiles in the corporate world and leaving casualties in her wake. There's a certain morality in the end that some may take offense to but I found it to be satisfying. "Waterloo Bridge" is a rather conventional love story between an American girl and a Canadian G.I. What distinguishes the film is that the girl is a streetwalker and the makers make no bones about her profession. A gritty film that could have been better if the principals, Mae Clarke and Kent Douglas, were better actors. Check out the remake with Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor even if it is a somewhat sanitized version. The weakest film in the set I found to be is "Red Headed Woman". Once again we find a girl from the wrong side of the tracks(Jean Harlow) attempting to sleep her way to the top despite the ancilliary damage she may cause. The film suffers from a certain degree of staginess and incidental campiness. Harlow, a gifted comedienne taken before her time, elevates the otherwise inert material. I recommend this collection because I think it fascinating how social mores have changed in some ways and other ways not since these films were released in the Thirties.
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