Josh Bell
Of the many things that the regressive Production Code took away from Hollywood movies once its enforcement began in 1934, the subgenre of movies about brazen gold-digging women is perhaps not the most egregious. But those are some of the most delightful movies to watch from the pre-Code era, evidence of vibrant, even nasty female characters who were allowed to flourish without moralistic repercussions. The two most prominent, enduring examples are Jean Harlow in 1932’s Red-Headed Woman and Barbara Stanwyck in 1933’s Baby Face, playing characters with nearly identical names and outlooks on life.
Baby Face was reportedly produced in response to the success of Red-Headed Woman, so it’s not surprising that the two movies have so much in common. Still, they stand strongly on their own, each providing a slightly different take on a woman from a working-class background who uses her sexual allure to take control of her destiny. Although both eventually involve a shooting, Red-Headed Woman is more lighthearted and comedic, focusing on Harlow’s buoyant screen presence. Baby Face has its humorous moments, too, but its tone is more melancholy, with Stanwyck bringing an undercurrent of sadness to her portrayal of the sharp-tongued protagonist.
Red-Headed Woman begins with Harlow’s Lil Andrews already established as a corporate assistant, determined to take advantage of powerful men to better her position. Other than literally saying that she’s from the wrong side of the tracks, she offers no insight into her background, and she seems to emerge fully formed from the salon chair where she dyes her hair red. Baby Face spends more time exploring the origins of Stanwyck’s Lily Powers, who begins the movie under her father’s harsh rule.
Lily learns about men while serving drunk, handsy factory workers at her father’s speakeasy, where he essentially pimps her out to a local politician to keep his business from being raided. Right after Lily fights off that politician’s latest advances, her father dies in a suspiciously convenient explosion of his illegal still. That frees Lily and her friend and fellow speakeasy worker Chico (Theresa Harris) to leave Erie, Pennsylvania, and seek their fortune in New York City. Lily’s solidarity with Chico, a Black woman, is another refreshing aspect of Baby Face, although Lily’s support for Chico means that she can eventually hire her as a maid, not that they’re ever truly on equal footing.
Lil never suffers from similar trauma in Red-Headed Woman, but both characters struggle under the restrictions of a patriarchal society, and both of them devise ways to use those restrictions to their advantage. “Well, he’s a man, isn’t he?” is Lil’s cheeky response when her roommate and best friend Sally (Una Merkel) questions her ability to seduce her married boss Bill Legendre (Chester Morris). Lil seems to have an implicit understanding of how the system works, and she never deviates from her goals, even when facing possible legal repercussions.
Lily requires a bit more of a push to set her on her path, which comes, ironically enough, from a man. Cobbler Adolf Cragg (Alphonse Ethier) is older and more respectful than the other customers at her father’s speakeasy, and he exhorts Lily to leave Erie and head for a big city, where she can fully realize her potential. He cites the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, telling Lily, “You must use men, not let them use you.” She’s skeptical at first, but she comes around quickly when a train yard watchman catches her and Chico sneaking into a freight car. Director Alfred E. Green discreetly shoots a close-up of the watchman’s gloves falling to the ground next to his lamp as he turns it off, but every viewer knows exactly what that means. Lily and Chico stay on the train.
Thus begins a series of transactional relationships, as Lily arrives in New York City and targets the massive Gotham Trust bank. She literally sleeps her way to the top, which Green represents by panning one level higher on the building after each of Lily’s conquests. Lily moves fairly quickly from man to man, while Lil mainly focuses her attention on Bill, working to separate him from his bland (and ridiculously forgiving) wife Irene (Leila Hyams).
Both women inspired frenzied attention from nearly every man they meet, and it’s not hard to see why. These movies might be categorized as proto-feminist, but that doesn’t mean that Green and Red-Headed Woman director Jack Conway don’t exploit their stars’ sex appeal. Just as Lily and Lil get what they want by playing on men’s lustful desires, Stanwyck and Harlow bring in audiences by playing on those same desires from male viewers. At the same time, they give smart, layered performances that hint at the emotional toll behind the games of seduction.
As much anguish as the men in these movies undergo when they give in to the protagonists’ machinations, there’s also unbridled pleasure in their interactions. Lily and Lil make these stuffy, often aging men feel youthful and alive again, and the Production Code doesn’t force the filmmakers to hide that. Lily works two men into such a frenzy that they resort to violence in their battle over her, while Lil easily bends the morals of a notoriously conservative coal tycoon. Even marriage is a flexible notion, as Lil angles to become Mrs. Legendre and then almost immediately starts angling to become the wife of an even more powerful man.
There’s no actual onscreen sex in either of these movies, but the implications are always clear, whether that’s a dissolve from one of Lily’s suitors arriving at her apartment at night to his departure the next morning, or the discovery of one of Lil’s handkerchiefs in the room of her latest lover. If there’s a reckoning for these characters by the end, it’s not in retaliation for being sexually liberated.
Lily eventually finds her match in new Gotham Trust president Courtland Trenholm (George Brent), who sees through her schemes because he himself is a dissolute playboy, not a repressed businessman. Lil falls for French chauffeur Albert (Charles Boyer), who’s delighted when she tells him she’s hooked another rich man. These women approach love, sex, and power on their own terms, with world-weary wit and cynicism. They know the game, and they play it well. It’s disappointing that the Production Code robbed them of even that small amount of autonomy.
