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When Lily’s speakeasy-owner father (Robert Barrat) is accidentally killed by a botched still-cleaning attempt at the beginning of Alfred E. Green’s Baby Face (1933), his 20-something-year-old daughter is the opposite of devastated. It marks the ending to the kind of misery from which she thought she’d never be freed — at least not this soon. (In addition to forcibly employing his daughter as a hostess, Lily’s father had also been selling her for sex to his customers ever since she celebrated her 14th birthday.) 

Needless to say that Lily won’t be shedding any tears at his funeral. She is, in any case, too busy being confronted with the possibilities of her future to try. Several of the male “mourners” offer her their condolences only so that they can more smoothly segue into pitching her jobs for which they think she’d be perfect. (They’re of the strip-club and burlesque-show variety.) She’s happy with her options. But an older, local cobbler Lily has befriended over the years — truly the only person, besides her co-worker-slash-best friend Chico (Theresa Harris), she actually trusts — is adamant that she aims higher. A Nietzsche adherent, the cobbler encourages her to not continue down a path similar to the one she’d already been on — one where men monopolize all the power in her life — but to do what she can to instead do the reverse: exploit male weaknesses (i.e., their sexual weaknesses) for her own gain.

Lily takes that to heart. And Baby Face thusly becomes, after she and Chico head to New York City looking for work, all about how Lily successfully fucks her way to the top. The process begins when she gets out of a surefire jail sentence (she and Chico take the NYC-bound train illegally) by seducing the railway worker who otherwise seemed like he was definitely going to rat them out. 

Baby Face has a porny conceit not immune from teetering into charming silliness: Lily almost sarcastically reading at her office desk a book whose title is simply Etiquette; her driving men to literally kill other men over her; her breaking up marriages with a devilishly pleased-with-herself grin. But writers Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola by and large treat the film’s premise with compelling seriousness where it counts. They tacitly admire Lily’s conviction about doing whatever it takes to succeed while also indicting a culture where it’s next to impossible for women to succeed fully on their own terms without in some way appeasing the men who hold power over them.

It’s hard not to feel a little disappointed when Baby Face unsurprisingly concludes with Lily pretty much relinquishing the ruthlessness she’d been so good at weaponizing — with her ultimately giving up her ambitions for the sake of love. (That comes when one of her conquests, played by George Brent, proves himself someone who looks at her not like an object but as a human being.) But the film nonetheless makes for a punchy 76 minutes, so bracing in its frankness about sex’s noxiously inextricable role from its era’s professional power dynamics that it’s since been heralded as one of the movies pivotal in the enactment of the unrelentingly moralistic production code that would stay in place for several more decades. It’s as much a badge of honor as a depressing reminder of all the similarly honest movies that could have been but never were.