BABY FACE. Warner Brothers, 1933. Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Donald Cook, Alphonse Ethier, Henry Kolker, Margaret Lindsay, Arthur Hohl, John Wayne, Robert Barrat, Douglass Dumbrille. Director: Alfred E. Green. Shown at Cinevent 19, Columbus OH, May 1987.

   Barbara Stanwyck is the star of Baby Face, the sordid tale of a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who rises to kept affluence in a series of bedroom maneuvers that redefine the term “permissible risque.”

   There’s a redemptive finale (which Stanwyck plays with a notable lack of conviction), but her hard-boiled, terse acting in this seventy minute film is riveting.

   There is a bit by John Wayne as one of the “Johns” she loves and dumps, while the other men in her life include Douglass Dumbrille, Donald Cook, and George Brent. Puzzle of the week: Who plays the man she finally really falls for and for whom she turns “good”?

   (This is like figuring out the murderer on the Angela Lansbury Murder, She Wrote series. Out of all the has-beens and never-were’s drafted for roles, who is the most unlikely and therefore most likely suspect?)

   Her role is tightly circumscribed, but within the assigned limits Stanwyck is superb. The more I see of her early work (and the American Movie Classics cable channel has shown several of her lesser thirties films), the more I am impressed by her.

   And then there is her unforgettable acting in Double Indemnity to crown a career that in recent years has shown all of the professionalism of this fine actress but with little of the distinctive beauty and intelligence of her early work.

[EDITORIAL UPDATE.]   Discovered in 2005 at the Library of Congress was a racier pre-release version of Baby Face that’s five minutes longer than the one seen by movie-going audiences in the 1930s. The unedited version is currently available on DVD.