Baby Face

Baby Face (1933) is a Pre-Code drama you can watch online on iFILM. Barbara Stanwyck plays Lily Powers, a speakeasy waitress whose own father has been selling her to his bar's customers since she was a teenager.

When he dies, Lily hops a freight car to New York with a single rule: no man gets anything for free again. Floor by floor she climbs a Manhattan bank tower — from the filing pool to the penthouse — leaving wrecked careers and one suicide in her wake. The higher the office, the steeper the price, until the money stops filling whatever she's actually missing.

Directed by Alfred E. Green, the film was so blunt that censors forced Warner Bros. to reshoot a softer ending, which is exactly why it became a banner title for everything Hollywood got away with before the Production Code clamped down. Stanwyck plays it without a shred of self-pity, and a young John Wayne turns up in a small role. Seventy-six minutes of pure nerve. Stream Baby Face online on iFILM.