silver nitrate notes

Baby Face and the Five Minutes the Censors Took

5 oct 2026

For years the Baby Face (1933) I knew was a 71-minute programmer about a waitress who sleeps her way up a bank. Then in 2004 a curator at the Library of Congress, Michael Mashon, was filling a rental request, pulled the two prints the library held, and noticed that one ran about five minutes longer. It was the version Warner Bros. had made before the censors got to it, and the picture it showed was a different one: harder, stranger, and a good deal more interested in what its heroine had been reading.

Barbara Stanwyck (1907-1990) plays Lily Powers, who starts out serving drinks in her father's speakeasy in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he pushes her at the customers. Alfred E. Green (1889-1960) directed, from a story credited to Mark Canfield, a pen name of Darryl F. Zanuck, and a screenplay by Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola. The cameraman was James Van Trees. It is a hard, quick, cheap-looking Warner picture of the kind the studio turned out by the dozen in the early thirties, with no gloss to speak of and a great deal of pace.

What turns Lily from a barmaid into a climber is a book. An old cobbler in the town, Mr. Cragg, hands her a volume of Nietzsche and tells her, in effect, to stop being used and start using. Lily takes it as a plan. She leaves Erie with her friend Chico (Theresa Harris) and arrives in New York, and the film follows her up the Gotham Trust Company one floor at a time, marking each conquest by moving up the building. The rise is blunt enough to be funny and shot with enough economy not to be a joke. A young John Wayne turns up in a bit part along the way, and it is a reminder of how little the studio thought it was making.

The cuts are the story. The New York state censorship board would not pass the film as Warner delivered it, and an edited print was approved months later. As far as the accounts go, the trimming took out a slow pan up Lily's legs and a politician's hands on her, and it softened the Nietzsche. Those are the obvious things, and they are not the important ones. The important thing is the tone. The shorter version lets you read Lily as a gold-digger and file her away. The longer one keeps the philosophy in the room, and that makes her a person who has made a decision, which is the thing the censors of the day found harder to tolerate than any pan.

I think that is why the picture belongs to the pre-Code years in a way that the more famous comedies do not. The Production Code was not enforced with any teeth until Joseph Breen took over in July 1934, and Baby Face is the sort of film that made the teeth necessary. It does not punish Lily in the way a later picture would have. She gets a good deal of what she wants, and the film only arrives at its conscience late and quickly. Compare it with Double Indemnity (1944), a decade later, where Stanwyck pays in full.

There is one more thing about the restored print that I keep coming back to. The longer print was already in the library's holdings, waiting for someone to compare the running times.

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sources
[1] Doherty, Thomas. Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
[2] Black, Gregory D. Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
[3] LaSalle, Mick. Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.
[4] "Baby Face." Senses of Cinema, Cteq Annotations on Film, 2005. Accessed October 2026.
[5] AFI Catalog entry for Baby Face (1933).