In the days before its Production Code got really strict (around 1934) Hollywood had extraordinary latitude in the subjects and attitudes it could address. Turner Classic Movies has just released a set of three pre-code films, under the title Forbidden Hollywood, that gives some startling examples of the freedom that was lost.
Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck, presents a world-view of jaw-dropping cynicism -- a case study of bimbo feminism that would be shocking even in a Hollywood film of today. Stanwyck plays Lily, a girl who's been hooking since she was 14, pimped out by her own father. She meets an eccentric Nieztsche fan who tells her to use her power over men ruthlessly, without sentiment or conscience, to get what she wants. And this she does -- fucking her way to the big city, and up the ladder of success, until she's the filthy rich mistress of a pathetic old banker.
The passion and jealousy Lily arouses in the men she uses eventually erupt in violence, and set up a nifty blackmail opportunity for her, but also throw her into the orbit of a different sort of man than she's used to, a man who knows all about her past but loves her anyway . . . and she finds a kind of redemption in his arms.
All the men Lily encounters, except for the last one, are slimeballs and pushovers, and Lily never shows even a flicker of remorse about exploiting them and destroying them. The really shocking thing is that the film doesn't condemn her for this, any more than her last lover does -- she's been dealt a bad hand in life, as a woman, and she's played it the best way she could.
This is all dizzyingly surreal. Seeing Hollywood stars and Hollywood production values deployed in the service of a story like this makes one feel one has entered an alternate universe -- except of course that it's closer to the universe we actually inhabit than to the post-code Hollywood version of reality.
Baby Face is lurid pulp melodrama at its most entertaining, and it's something more, too -- a vision of what movies might have been if corporate hypocrisy and totalitarian concepts of social hygiene hadn't put them in an artistic straightjacket.
Rush out and get this set, and prepare to be seriously discombobulated.