TCM Archives - Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 1 (Waterloo Bridge [1931] / Baby Face / Red-Headed Woman)
by Alfred E. Green, Jack Conway, James Whale
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Actor: Alphonse Ethier, Barbara Stanwyck, Donald Cook, George Brent, Henry KolkerDirector: Alfred E. Green, Jack Conway, James Whale
Brand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD-Video, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 308 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-12-05
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Warner Home Video
DVD Reviews of TCM Archives - Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 1 (Waterloo Bridge [1931] / Baby Face / Red-Headed Woman)
DVD Review: Three bad movies
Summary: 2 Stars
These three movies have been beaufifully restored, but it doesn't change the fact that artistically they are bad. The acting is stiff, stagy. The writing is the same or worse.
Waterloo Bridge, perhaps the best of the lot, feels like a stage play, which was what it was in a previous life. Mae Clarke is attractive as the lead, but the soldier who falls in love with her is wretched. We are asked to believe that he fell in love with a prostitute minutes after meeting her and proposed marriage, whereupon he introduced her to his upper class family. Bah!
The other two movies, Red Headed Woman and Baby Face have even sillier plots and acting that is just as bad--or worse. The advertising of these movies would lead one to believe that they are racy, but the raciest scene in any of the three are the legs on the front of the case. The Hayes Office code didn't curtail the creativity of moviemakers, if these films are examples of Hollywood in its sinful era.
DVD Review: Stanwyck shines in newly found pre-code Hollywood
Summary: 4 Stars
Baby Face was one of the most notorious pre-Code films to come out of Hollywood. Starring Barbara Stanwyck as Lilly "Baby Face" Palmer, a barmaid who decides to climb the social ladder by seducing every man who can open the doors for her on the way to the top. The film was submitted to the New York State Board of Censors for consideration. It was quickly rejected and soon banned across the United States for its explicit sexual innuendo. With some of its steamier scenes either cut or re-shot, and a new ending tacked on, it was finally released, still full of sexual innuendo. After the Production Code was enforced in 1934, the film, even in its censored version, was not allowed to be re-released. Amazingly enough, in 2004, a copy of the original, un-edited film was unearthed in the Library of Congress. After 70 years, the uncensored Baby Face finally received its public premiere at Film Forum in New York City on January 24th, 2005 and was subsequently released on DVD in the first volume of Warners' Forbidden Hollywood collection.
Note the vhs of the same name is the censored theatrical version and not the 2004 discovered original 1933 version which appears here for the first time.
DVD Review: What fun!
Summary: 5 Stars
If you think today's movies are too permissive,you shoul see what Hollywood was making in the early Thirties.These three films are very good examples of what the studios got away with before the Production Code came in."Baby Face" is a typical fast-moving,realistic Warner Bros.
film of the period,with a sharp script,solid direction,and a marvelous performance by Barbara Stanwyck."Waterloo Bridge" is an acceptable version of the Robert Sherwood classic,but it's not up to MGM's ultra-
glossy remake with Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor.The real standout here is "Red-Headed Woman",Jack Conway's hilarious version of the Katherine Brush novel,with a witty Anita Loos script and a brilliant star-making performance from Jean Harlow.These pictures are still fun to watch.Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Volume Three (Other Men's Women / The Purchase Price / Frisco Jenny / Midnight Mary / Heroes for Sale / Wild Boys of the Road)TCM Archives - Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 2 (The Divorcee / A Free Soul / Night Nurse / Three on a Match / Female)Red Dust
DVD Review: Censors: Then & Now
Summary: 4 Stars
My husband and I enjoyed all three. After seeing the uncensored version of 'Baby Face' we had to check and make sure we hadn't watched the censored version by mistake.
By today's standards these movies would be considered PG13. Wish censors today had stricter standards.
DVD Review: 30's Classics
Summary: 5 Stars
We obtained this collection because we were curious to see films that were considered forbidden during the 1930's and it is interesting to realize what Hollywood gets away with today, vs. what was considered taboo in the early part of the 20th Century.
To briefly remind ourselves of what the 30s was all about... the USA's population was 123 million people, living in 48 states with a life expectancy of 58 years for men and 61 for females. People were making an average salary of $1,400 and unemployment had risen to 25%. What once was known for the land of opportunity had become the land of desperation and Americans fell into the Great Depression. Rather than a society where people advanced in the natural progression of economic means, Americans experienced a time where survival became the keyword and while democracy prevailed, the attitude and lifestyle of many focused on climbing at whatever costs, to reach monetary power.
Baby Face
Barbara Stanwyck is a favorite of ours, so we selected this movie as first in the collection, and were delighted to see a very young Stanwyck playing the part of a young woman who lives her life struggling to make ends meet by working for her despicable father, who attempts to "sell" her favors to his clients. A friend gives her books for her to develop her mind and he counsels her to learn the works of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche so she learns "to use men" to get herself out of the life she has and to move up until she reaches "her potential."
So... she moves to New York City and "uses men" all the way to the top, climbing from floor to floor until she reaches the boardroom. At some point, she meets her match, a man that sees through her manipulation of men to acquire wealth, and astutely he turns it around, sending her to work at one of the bank's branches in Paris, France. They meet again and finally this woman finds love and marriage and is confronted with the perennial quandary: now she has much but must give it all up to save the man, whom for the first time in her life, inspires her to say "I love you." Excellent film.
Red-Headed Woman
Jean Harlow performs as a young woman in search of fortune and she sets her eyes on the "boss," played by Chester Morris. She takes the mail to his home and makes advances to him, so preposterous that it is sickening to watch. By now we were realizing that aside from these movies surfacing forbidden topics, such as undressing in front of the cameras, which is a mild exposure of arms and legs, or alluding to sexual scenes may have been seen as sinful, the topics were about men and how easily they fall pray to a woman willing to do anything for their money, power or protection.
The main character is able to break her boss's marriage, destroying his family and happiness. As the plot thickens, she moves on to another wealthy older gentleman, but this time her new husband hires a private detective and soon has proof of her betrayal to both husband and lover, for while the older gentleman takes her out in style, she is also having an affair with his French chauffeur, played by Charles Boyer.
The movie has a rather poignant subject for the times, it is interesting to watch, but the performances are a bit contrived.
Waterloo Bridge
The final film in this collection is about a chorus girl played by Mae Clarke who is forced to walk the streets to make ends meet. A soldier played by Kent Douglass is the well to do man she has been looking for, but these are the times when a girl from the lowest class is not permitted to marry, however pure her intentions are, into a wealthy family.
Frankly, it is remarkable how the movies of the 30s seem to have substance and tell stories that teach the consequences of our actions. While society was not yet as advanced as ours, the effort is worth seeing and enjoying. Don't miss this collection!
Description of TCM Archives - Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 1 (Waterloo Bridge [1931] / Baby Face / Red-Headed Woman)
Includes: Waterloo Bridge (1931), Baby Face (1933), and Red-Headed Woman (1932).Here are three films that couldn't and wouldn't have been made at any other time. Contrary to popular belief, the history of Hollywood permissiveness, what filmmakers could "get away with" on screen, is not a steadily rising graph from puritanical early days to the party-hearty present. In the early 1930s, a national mood of shock over the stock market crash and impatience with Prohibition licensed a relaxation of the movie industry's self-censorship policies. Sexuality--always a driving force in movie plots and characterizations, even when repressed--became a more explicit presence, with costuming that sometimes pushed the envelope for exposure of epidermis and dialogue that could be shockingly blunt.
Baby Face (1933) was made at Warner Bros., the golden-age studio with the grittiest style and the most street cred. The gutsy Barbara Stanwyck stars as a young woman from a factory town who hops a boxcar to the big city and sleeps her way to the top--a progress famously indexed by a camera ascending floor by floor outside a Gotham office building as she trades up, one corporate suitor after another. No other major-studio film was more explicit about sex as a tool and a commodity, yetBaby Face is curiously less sexy than any number of movies that weren't so outspoken about it. This TCM collection features both the theatrical-release version familiar for decades and a recently rediscovered preview version that is markedly superior, runs five minutes longer, and includes more sexual liaisons. It also happily lacks an absurd final scene that got tacked onto the release version to explain how the heroine learned to be content with a modest lifestyle.
Red-Headed Woman (1932) is arguably the raunchiest movie Jean Harlow made at MGM (though not as raunchy as her scenes in Howard Hughes' 1930 Hell's Angels). Unlike Stanwyck in Baby Face--a proletarian heroine grimly selling herself to beat capitalism and the patriarchy at their own game--Harlow's character brazenly relishes both the sex and the posh life it wins for her. The lion's share of this sardonic comedy, scripted by Anita Loos and an uncredited F. Scott Fitzgerald, focuses on Harlow's seduction of her married boss (Chester Morris) and the havoc she wreaks in his upper-crust world. Charles Boyer has a role (his first Hollywood credit) as a French chauffeur who knows how to give satisfaction, and the film's air of breezy ribaldry even allows the star a casual flash of bare breast.
The rarest item in the collection, the 1931 Universal version of Waterloo Bridge, has long been unseen because MGM bought the film in order to do a 1940 remake (starring Vivien Leigh) and locked the original away in the vault. Directed by James Whale the same year he did Frankenstein (1931), the picture charts the romance of a chorus-girl-turned-streetwalker (Mae Clarke) and a well-born young soldier (Kent Douglass) on brief furlough from the trenches during WWI. Apart from a zesty prelude in a London music hall and two scenes on the titular bridge, the film remains yoked to its talky theatrical source, a Robert E. Sherwood play flogging the hoary conceit that no fallen woman, however pure of heart, could be permitted to marry into a good family. Unlike the Hays Code-compliant remake, the film leaves no doubt how the heroine makes her living. --Richard T. Jameson
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