The plot description of this movie is wild: a young woman, desperate to escape the abusive trauma of her childhood, takes some advice from Nietzsche (?) and moves to the city, sexually exploiting men as she literally sleeps her way to the top of a major bank, causing a murder, a suicide, a broken engagement, and an attempted suicide in the process. This movie is DARK, but it’s FUN: therein lies the beauty of pre-Code films. (Speaking of beauty, Barbara Stanwyck is a revelation in this movie.)

Perhaps the fun comes from the incongruity caused by my own distance to the time period: watching some of the content you get pre-Code feels inherently transgressive, like you’re watching something that shouldn’t have been made. Because pre-Code is such a short time period, most of my experience watching older movies involves the sanitized Hollywood productions that would come to dominate film until the 60s. But watching something like Baby Face you see themes that are dark and disturbing, yes, but they’re fundamentally interesting in a way that you won’t see again for a while.