Movie Review: Babyface.

From the dirt cheap speak-easy, to the NYC boardrooms, then to the family living room, via a lot of expensive gifts and cheap feelings.  I wanted to take my pants off during a few points of the movie, just a few brief make-outs, but somehow, I also felt too dirty, and gazing at once, at the screen, and also into my own self, my own dubious heart, I relented and let the footage roll.

Stanwyck had been sorta wholesome in 16 prior performances, and wanted somewhat of a change of pace, and what we get, "its a wonderful life" for prostitutes, and a few pointers from Friedrich Nietzsche.  It's enough to warm the heart of mind of many an Instagram diva, I wot.

All she had to do was smile, and lean in; but she had to be told first, by the old German that called her friend, Mein Freunde, who mislead her by leading her to Nietzsche and taking her complete control over men, such that in the script, at various points the lifestyle makeovers were only of a two-week duration.

So much in so little time, gather her rosebuds while she may, pawed over back home by drunk factory workers, and trying to be an honest girl until the life of philosophy came to her: a misguided interpretation of Nietzsche's Will To Power.

And she slept her way further up the food chain, with the convenient set piece of the camera moving slowly up the building exterior, until at last, not even the vaguest pretense of a day job, and her servant has servants, and that was the great two week fleecing of the bank president.

"You don't have any family in the city?"

She fled one set of urchins to nest with a set that were lovebird urchins, love sponges, and she became, as such that which she loathed, one of the people using other persons as a means to an end, and not more justly as a means unto themselves.

Zanuck the elder of Fox moviehouse royalty supposedly scripting a tight script of his own accord, tight and with zero extraneous parts or pieces, save for a suitor John Wayne type of guy that is basically heckled off screen early on; Producer Zanuck is Screenwriter Canfield is Producer Zanuck, so to speak, no credited ghost writers, no credited scene hacks, and with a tight, terse bit of screenplay, the director works his cast fairly well in the course of a rather stripped-down bit of scenes.

We can like the last guy, because she's supposed to like the last guy, so in casting and performance, the director and the actor make their magic, and its effective.

Why not like the last guy?

Let me tell you something, Instagram divas, he's not the last guy, probably, at all, if you don't actually like him--he will no sooner be traded off like a scuffed shoe, and without the dignity of so much as a rat turd in his pocket, fed then bled, and set off to continue his own adventures, for surely Stanwyck's Lilly Powers was to have so many of her own adventures with new game, new sport, new fresh hunting on fertile grounds.  You go on to fresh game, discarded suitor, as she does the same, the Will To Power version of the old adage, "live and let live".

Ten minutes, the It's A Wonderful Life surprise bit, and not the overly moralized ending.  At once, to let the criminal realize his own crime, and the criminal set to look feelings of guilt and remorse up close, in private. 

3 of 4 stars.  Barebones script with good performances and direction.  Barbara Stanwyck, Zanuck, and good old Fred Nietzsche.

or

7.5/10 stars.

I could watch a solid 3/4 any day, but this time, a nod of respect to the awesome body of work of Barbara Stanwyck, and part of Darryl Zanuck's portfolio, too.